Winter 2020: Hindsight 2020

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

STORMED EARTH

SUMMER IN BELARUS

AMERICA’S ACHILLES HEEL

VOLUME LI NO. 4, WINTER 2020 HARVARDPOLITICS.COM

HINDSIGHT

2020

HARVARDPOLITICS.COM/REDLINE

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HINDSIGHT 2020 This issue’s cover topic was edited by Swathi Kella, Chloe E.W. Levine, Sophia Weng

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Stormed Earth Jack Silvers

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The New Anti-Vax Austin Taylor

16 On the Border Sama Kubba

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In God We Trust: How American Christianity Became Republicanism Amen Gashaw

CAMPUS 19 Do My Professors’ Politics Matter?

Akila Muthukumar

UNITED STATES

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Do My Professors’ Politics Matter?

Akila Muthukumar

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Biden, the Middle East, and the Restoration of the “Blob” Johannes Lang

CULTURE 36

Racial Justice in Rural Colorado Johneth Price

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It Is 2020, and Puerto Rico Is Still a Colony Harold Peón

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The Fraught Path to Diversity in Fashion Media Sraavya Sambara

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Life in Limbo: Pandemic Policy and Immigration Backlogs Donovan Keene

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Patriarchy in Disney’s Live-Action Mulan Sophia Weng

28 We Must Protect Our Environmental Protections Madison Goldberg

INTERVIEWS 44

WORLD 34 Water is China’s Greatest Weapon and its Achilles Heel Jack Silvers

A New Genre: Empathy, Sound, and Creation Amid the Pandemic Sofia Andrade

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Water is China’s Greatest Weapon and its Achilles Heel Jack Silvers

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The Fault in Our Stars: Modern Threats to International Space Law Chinyere Obasi

‘The Racial Contract’: Interview with Philosopher Charles W. Mills Woojin Lim

ENDPAPER 48

Productivity in a Post-2020 World Wyatt Hurt

Email: president@harvardpolitics.com. ISSN 0090-1032. Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved. Image Credits: Creative Commons: 6- Thoth, God of Knowledge; 9- Shardayyy; The Noun Project: 12-13ReivNick, ID; Unsplash: Cover- Han Min T; Cover-Macau Photo Agency; Cover- Lerone Pieters; 1- Heather Zabriskie; 3- Cullan Smith; 3- Viktor Talashuk; 6- Çaglar OSKAY; 14-15- Edwin Andrade; 16- Barbara Zandoval; 16- Hakan Nural; 19- Jeremy McGilvrey; 19- Magnus Olsson; 22- Matthew T Rader; 23- Christian Crocker; 25- Dima Pechurin; 28- Annie Spratt; 33- Eric Tompkins; 33- NASA; 39- Alexi Romano; 39- Erik Mclean; 39- Hipkicks; 39- AndrewBrght Photography; 39- NordWood Themes; 42- Violette Filippini; 48- Eric Rothermel; Design by: Swathi Kella, Trina Lilja, Madison Shirazi, and Fatima Taj.

WINTER 2020 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 1

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

FROM THE PRESIDENT Isolation

A Nonpartisan Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Est. 1969—Vol. LI, No. 3

EDITORIAL BOARD PRESIDENT: Alexis Mealey PUBLISHER: Wyatt Hurt MANAGING EDITOR: Marian Bothner ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR (interim): Jessica Boutchie ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR (on leave): Ilana Cohen ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR (on leave): Clay Oxford STAFF DIRECTOR: Cate Brock SENIOR COVERS EDITOR: Kendrick Foster ASSOCIATE COVERS EDITOR: Kate Gundersen SENIOR U.S. EDITOR (on leave): Joseph Winters ASSOCIATE U.S. EDITOR: Swathi Kella ASSOCIATE U.S. EDITOR: Chloe Levine SENIOR WORLD EDITOR: Kelsey Chen ASSOCIATE WORLD EDITOR: Ruhi Nayak ASSOCIATE WORLD EDITOR: Ajay Sarma SENIOR CULTURE EDITOR: Jacob Blair ASSOCIATE CULTURE EDITOR: Christine Mui SENIOR CAMPUS EDITOR: Winona Guo ASSOCIATE CAMPUS EDITOR: Jaden Deal INTERVIEWS EDITOR: George Dalianis BUSINESS MANAGER: Duncan Glew ASSOCIATE BUSINESS MANAGER (on leave): Victoria Verna ASSOCIATE BUSINESS MANAGER (interim): Arpit Bhate SENIOR DESIGN EDITOR: Trina Lilja ASSOCIATE DESIGN EDITOR (interim): Austin Taylor SENIOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Jacob Heberle ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR (on leave): Nicolas Medrano ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR (on leave): Annelisa Kingsbury Lee ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR (interim): Ryan Golemme ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR (interim): Meimei Xu SENIOR TECH DIRECTOR: Kodi Obika ASSOCIATE TECH DIRECTOR: Yaodong Yu ASSOCIATE TECH DIRECTOR: David Hacker COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT DIRECTOR: Alexandra Diggs

STAFF Alex Tam, Alienor Manteau, Alisha Ukani, Alison Chen, Allison Piper, Amy Danoff, Amy Wang, Annelisa Kingsbury Lee, Audrey Sheehy, Ava Salzman, Ben Roberts, Benjamin Firester, Brammy Rajakumar, Bridger Gordon, Byron Hurlbut, Campbell Erickson, Caroline Yun, Carter Nakamoto, Charles Xu, Chloe Lemmel-Hay, Chris Sun, Christian Browder, Clara Bates, Clara Nevins, Colton Carpenter, Connor Brown, Connor Schoen, Daniel Friedman, David Hacker, DJ Kranchalk, Eleonore Evans, Eli Berlin, Emily Malpass, Emily Moss, Emmet Halm, Enrique Sanchez, Esha Chaudhuri, Ethan Schultz, Fatima Taj, Gabrielle Landry, Garrett O’Brien, Graham Walter, Hadley DeBello, Hafsa Muse, Hope Kudo, Isabel Cole, Isabel Isselbacher, Jacob Kern, Jake McIntyre, Jamal Nimer, James Blanchfield, James Coleman, Jamie Bikales, Jamie Weisenberg, Jay Gopalan, Jerrica Li, Jerry Huang, Johannes Lang, John Ball, Jon Riege, Jordan Barton, Jose Larios, Joseph Minatel, Josh Berry, Katharine Heintz, Katherine Ho, Katie Miao, Kevin Bi, Lainey Newman, Lauren Baehr, Lauren Fadiman, Leila Wass, Libby Palanza, Lindsey Bouldin, Lu Shao, Manuel Abecasis, Marcus Trenfield, Matthew Hatfield, Matthew Shaw, Max Snyder, Maya Bharara, Meena Venkataramanan, Melissa Kwan, Mfundo Radebe, Michael Montella, Michael Wornow, Mikael Tessema, Mimi Alphonsus, Miyu Imai, Mustafa Ansari, Natalie Dabkowski, Nicholas Sleeper, Nick Danby, Nidal Morrison, Nikole Naloy, Noah Knopf, Noah Redlich, Otto Barenberg, Pawel Rybacki, Peyton Dunham, Roger Cawdette, Rumi Khan, Ryan Chung, Ryan Golemme, Sam Meyerson, Samantha FrenkelPopell, Sandy Koenig, Sanika Mahajan, Sarah Deonarain, Sarah Tisdall, Satish Wasti, Sophie Dicara, Tamara Shamir, Tom Slack, Vanessa Ruales, Will Finigan, Will Polster, William Boggs, Yash Kumbhat, Yashaar Hafizka, Yuri-Grace Ohashi, Zachary Buttenwieser, Zehan Zhou SENIOR WRITERS: Amir Siraj, Jessica Boutchie, Alicia Zhang, Sarah Shamoon, Keshav Rastogi, Will Imbrie-Moore, Lauren Anderson, Hank Sparks, Matthew Rossi, Meena Venkataramanan, Corbin Duncan, Gordon Kamer, Sarah Deonarain, Anirudh Suresh, Darwin Peng, Andrew Zucker

ADVISORY BOARD Jonathan Alter Richard L. Berke E.J. Dionne, Jr. Ron Fournier

Walter Isaacson Whitney Patton Maralee Schwartz

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As I write this letter, I am, for once, at a loss for words. When I wrote the last President’s Note in January, the world looked radically different from that which we see today. We looked forward with hope for a new decade, only to be faced immediately with immense hardship. Societies across the world have been turned upside down, and we have all struggled to adapt. More than six months after the initial American outbreak of COVID-19, we continue to weather this storm in solidarity with the many whose lives have been lost and the countless others whose lives will never be the same.

Yet in the wake of this pandemic, one fact remains apparent: life moves forward. We struggle onwards, negotiating our global grief within the simultaneously harsh and hopeful reality that life must continue. We find new ways to connect, new ways to laugh, and new ways to exist.

This issue of the Harvard Political Review is no exception. Compiled from within our homes all over the world, rather than in the basement of Harvard’s Lamont Library, “Isolation” reflects on these new normals and serves as a written testimony to our continued existence as a publication.

First, Sruthi Palanippan explores how COVID-19 has changed children’s access to early educational opportunities and exacerbated existing, lasting inequalities in “Kids, COVID-19 and Preschool over Zoom.” Writer Alexander Chen then moves to discussing the impact of COVID-19 on the opioid epidemic, arguing that the measures taken to halt the spread of the pandemic have exacerbated the opioid epidemic by contributing to crippling loneliness in “The Lonely OD.” Karina Ascunce continues this examination of loneliness in “Neurology of Loneliness,” diving into the impacts of prolonged isolation on long-term mental health while also considering the ways in which individuals have found connection in spite of the pandemic. Finally, in “Hasty Hookups,” Christine Mui moves beyond the COVID-19 pandemic to explore the feelings of isolation associated with hookup culture on college

campuses.

Each of these pieces is filled with top-notch analysis from some of our most talented staff, but to our publication, this magazine represents something greater.

This magazine was written and produced during the summer after we were evacuated from campus with just five days to pack our belongings, say goodbye to friends, and return to homes that many of us no longer recognized in all corners of the world. This magazine is not just a collection of articles. It is evidence of our grit, our resilience and our commitment to good journalism and to one another.

Over the past seven months, we have lived at home, continued on with our classes and dealt with the uncertainty of this pandemic. Nevertheless, we at the HPR have still hit milestones we never dreamed could be possible, breaking alltime viewership records on our website and publishing almost daily throughout the spring. In all of this uncertainty, the HPR has served as a point of light and solace in my life and in the lives of so many of our staff. We have you, our readers, to thank for allowing us to continue to share our thoughts and stories with you, and we will be forever grateful. We hope that you enjoy this magazine that, to us at the HPR, represents so much more.

Alexis Mealey President

ISOLATION

by Jack Silvers

O

n Nov. 8, 2018, the town of Paradise, California became hell. The sky turned black. Dead birds fell from the sky.

And a fiery inferno enveloped the secluded hamlet, destroying thousands of homes and killing 85 people. Over the following year and half, the town began to rebuild. But this September, the skies darkened again. An evacuation warning was lifted, but for many residents the memories of destruction were enough to compel them to flee.

Paradise’s plight is representative of California’s cycle of wildfires and rebuilding, which has left Californians unsettlingly familiar with tragedy. One Paradise man described the chain of events to CNN as “relentless punishment.” This year, nature punished California in two ways: through the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed almost 18,000 Californians, and one of the worst fire seasons in the state’s history. So far, California’s fires have burned more than four million acres, caused damages in excess of $10 billion, and killed 32.

These terrors are the result of a perfect storm of risk factors, including 12,000 lightning strikes in August and a recordbreaking heat wave in September. However, climate change, the elephant in the room when discussing any natural disaster, affects many of these events. Therefore, even if this fire season can simply be attributed to the cosmic implosion that is 2020, there is a real possibility that the future could bring fire seasons even worse than the current one. That puts the onus on local, state, and national leaders to reexamine decades of misguided fire policies. For California, the spotlight must be on poor fuel management in forests and continued construction in high-risk areas.

Adequately addressing all the factors that contribute to deadly and destructive wildfires will be dizzyingly complex,

likely requiring huge injections of capital and ambitious policy changes. In formulating a new approach, California will have to confront a dilemma that the country will face for years to come: How much are we willing to change now to avert climate catastrophes later? If California does not answer this question by rejecting the status quo and taking more urgent action, it will continue to burn and watch the rest of the nation burn with it.

LIGHTING THE RIGHT FIRES Smokey the Bear, the lovable grizzly who advises campers to keep their wits around the fire pit, has been the face of the US Forest Service since the 1940s. This ad campaign, by emphasizing fire suppression, enshrined a simple but significant principle in U.S. forest policy: Fire is something to be put out, and put out quickly.

This philosophy trickled down to state forest agencies, which generally followed the lead of the Forest Service. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Production (“Cal Fire”) sprouted in 1905 aiming to monitor and suppress wildfires in the state’s 15 million acres of forestland. This diffuse and localized system of lookouts and ranger stations gradually expanded and secured increased funding from the state. In the 1800s, frequent, low-intensity fires burned 5 to 12% of California’s land. With Cal Fire patrolmen ready to pour water on any detected burn, the state hasn’t come close to that percentage since.

But Cal Fire became too skilled at its own job. When land that is meant to burn is prevented from doing so, small trees and underlying vegetation overpopulate forests. Climate change has yielded rising temperatures and inconsistent rainfall patterns, which leave forests with large amounts of dry fuel waiting for a

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HINDSIGHT 2020

spark. The ignition could come from wind, lightning, a downed power line, or even an overly extravagant gender reveal party.

State Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, who has represented Santa Barbara County since 2012 and chaired the state’s Joint Legislative Committee on Emergency Management, told the HPR that today’s fires “burn hotter, burn faster, and cover far greater swathes of territory.”

Getting a grip on the current fire predicament will require an end to indiscriminate fire-fighting and the adoption of a more balanced approach. As Jackson put it, “We have to respect nature’s power, and try to work with it instead of destroying it.”

To bring down the level of dry fuel within the state’s forests, Cal Fire will have to make much more frequent use of prescribed fires, the intentional and controlled burning of forestland. To this end, former Governor Jerry Brown approved $1 billion of spending over five years to clear excess brush. Sadly, this package took effect in early 2019 — months after the Camp Fire razed Paradise.

Like Brown’s fire prevention regime, current Governor Gavin Newsom has taken necessary steps, but they could be too little and too late. A memorandum of understanding that the state signed with the US Forest Service in August to jointly treat one million acres of land annually would be a major step forward, if fully implemented. However, that is a large “if,” considering that the state’s efforts have so far peaked at about 125,000 acres annually and the price of large-scale fuel treatment could break into the billions.

HOME, SWEET, FIERY HOME Even if the resources and personnel required for such a prescribed burning bonanza were standing at the ready, there would be another problem: In modern-day California, you can only burn so far until you hit houses. More than 11 million Californians live in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), where man-made structures meet foliage, and 800,000 homes are located in moderate to extremely high-risk wildfire areas. Besides the damage-control implications of having millions of people live right next to fire-prone areas, construction along the WUI restricts the range of prescribed burns and increases the risk of human-caused blazes.

So why not simply leave the WUI? Firstly, there is the issue of convincing millions of residents, many of whom have lived in the backcountry for decades, to pack up and go. Then, there is the much larger issue: California’s unprecedented housing crisis that has 151,000 people homeless and 47% of voters reporting that they can’t afford to live in their own state. Due to decades of exclusionary zoning and NIMBYism — when local community groups block new developments — affordable housing in California is rarer than snow in Los Angeles. State Senator Scott Wiener, who chairs the California Senate’s Housing Committee, told the HPR, “It’s not enough to say, let’s not build in the wildfire zones. We get the question, ‘Where are you going to build?’”

Reducing the number of individuals who live in at-risk communities will require major strides on the housing front. Governor Newsom has brought verve to this conversation, entering office promising a “Marshall Plan” for housing and 3.5 million new homes by 2025. Yet last year, the state broke ground on just 120,000 new units, and some of the boldest legislative proposals have been stymied. A bill that Wiener proposed that would have

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permitted much denser development around public transit was defeated in the legislature, though he said that “It opened the door to other bills that are now more palatable.”

The inability of the state to adequately house its citizenry makes it difficult to stop building in remote areas, a necessity to stem the rising destruction of wildfires. Frustratingly, efforts to promote resilient construction through retrofitting have also underwhelmed. Newsom vetoed Senate Bill 182, which would have required localities to identify structures in need of retrofitting and restricted their ability to approve extremely high-risk development, in October, citing the need to balance wildfire resilience with the state’s housing needs. While Wiener was unsurprised by the governor’s veto, Jackson, the bill’s primary author, lamented that the governor couldn’t “take a broader view of the issue.”

Delaying land use reform doesn’t only leave the WUI vulnerable, it leaves a glaring hole in California’s otherwise robust climate policy. While the state has capped automobile emissions, it has done far less to reduce driving itself by prioritizing housing that is close to amenities. Adam Millard-Ball, an urban planning and environmental economics researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told the HPR that “There’s plenty of vacant or underused urban real estate that has good access to transit and walkable communities, but it’s really difficult to build on that land.” Houses next to wildlands, he said, can be doubly harmful: “We definitely shouldn’’ be building more car-dependent housing in the WUI because it’s not just a risk for fires, it’s also making the climate crisis worse.”

Evidently, improving wildfire preparedness will demand a climate policy that is not only deep in a few areas but is wideranging — one that invites collaboration between local areas, state governments, and the federal government.

A REVITALIZED PARTNER? During the Trump administration, it appeared that California and the federal government diverged on fire management. The president has embroiled wildfires in what some have described as a personal vendetta against the state, mocking the state’s supposed incompetence in forest management and threatening to cut off federal disaster aid before backing down. The irony of Trump’s mockery is that his government controls 57% of California’s forests, a fact that isn’t lost on the two state senators. Both indicated that deeper collaboration with the federal government will be paramount under the Biden-Harris administration.

California would be especially wise to capitalize on a more amicable federal partner because it is fiscally limited in its policy options. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the state’s budget, the scale of investment necessary for a statefunded approach to retrofitting and prescribed burns would be gargantuan. David Garcia, the policy director of the Terner Center for Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview with the HPR that it would be prohibitively expensive for the state to fund individual residents’ home improvements due to the sheer number of houses that need retrofitting.

Meanwhile, Wiener described Cal Fire as too under-resourced to effectively perform both fire suppression and fire prevention.

Fortunately for the Golden State, Joe Biden ran on a platform of massive investment to turbocharge the nation’s fight against climate change. Retrofitting and affordable housing both

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make appearances in the Biden climate plan. However, Biden will likely preside over a divided government, and congressional Republicans are likely to favor market-based reforms over government spending (except perhaps on green infrastructure).

Biden’s first steps on wildfires, then, should be more incremental. Directing federal agencies to relax air quality standards that make prescribed burns difficult and proposing a budget that strengthens, not cuts, funding for the Forest Service would be a worthy start.

Where does this leave California? In a place where it has the knowledge to be a leader on wildfire management for a nation experiencing more and more wildfires, but is missing the execution. In the short-term, the state should focus on productive bills that have already been written; for example, SB1120 would allow millions of single-family housing units to be split into duplexes. This bill passed both houses of the legislature but failed to become law because time ran out on the legislative session — a shining example of the sluggishness of reform. In the

longer-term, California’s leadership should haggle the federal government to pull its weight on fuel treatment and partner with the insurance industry, which has a vested interest in the fire problem, to reasonably disincentivize frisky building.

When the state doesn’t make the tough decisions, nature will. 2020 has illustrated the natural world’s awesome power to reward the prepared and punish the ill-prepared. In California, this dynamic is somewhat skewed: The state capitol in Sacramento is mostly sheltered from wildfires, while the residents of at-risk towns, even when they plan their evacuation routes and clear brush, get burned. Some of these Californians, unable or simply uninterested in finding housing elsewhere, leave the state. Jackson says it is “tragic” that so many people do so. For a state which prizes its natural beauty and forward-thinking government policy to be undone by nature’s wrath and lackluster policy? Tragic indeed. 

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HINDSIGHT 2020

by Austin Taylor

The New Anti-Vax “W

ould you get a COVID vaccine if one was released in the near future?” I asked Myla Kreider, of Palmyra, Maine. “Absolutely not,” she responded. Jenny Hall, of Albion, Maine, had the same response.

“I just feel like there’s not enough data, and I don’t know what the long term effects would be, or the efficacy,” she told the HPR. Unexpectedly, neither Kreider nor Hall is anti-vax. Their children have received the full vaccine schedule.

These women are not alone. Some rather shocking polls have been released recently: In September, Pew reported 49% of Americans would not get a COVID-19 vaccine, an 80% increase from their May poll. In October, CNN reported 45% of Americans would not get a COVID-19 vaccine. The anti-vax movement has seen a resurgence in recent years, but its scale gave no indication of such a massive rejection. As we inch toward a full year of this pandemic, the promise of a vaccine has been painted as the light at the end of the tunnel. But a vaccine does not help us reach herd immunity if Americans refuse to receive it.

Although we can frame the current issue with the ongoing anti-vax movement and the increasing politicization of science, in order to address skepticism about the COVID-19 vaccine spe-

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cifically we must understand what makes it different. Namely, the group is more diverse, and they have a better argument.

Trust in public health experts and in science as an institution rests precariously on the way COVID-19-anti-vax is handled.

That leaves us asking, in true 2020 fashion: What now? We must consider and provide individualized messaging for each type of COVID-anti-vaxxer, but more importantly, we must maintain a high level of transparency and clarity to leave the pandemic with networks of trust intact.

THE OLD ANTI-VAX Religious anti-vaxxers existed even before the first true vaccine in 1796. With the campaign against the smallpox vaccine, the group expanded to those with anecdotal evidence of harm or lack of trust in medicine. As vaccines became more heavily regulated and potentially mandated, some Americans declared them an affront to personal liberty (as did some British citizens).

Anti-vaccination sentiment rises and falls. After a report claimed the pertussis vaccine caused 36 neurological problems in the 1970s, there was a massive decrease in uptake and a severe

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outbreak in Britain. In response, the government implemented financial incentives for doctors who vaccinated a quota, and released a reassessment of vaccine safety. The combination successfully increased vaccination rates to effective levels.

The most recent anti-vax surge was catalyzed by Andrew Wakefield’s now-retracted publication in “The Lancet” which claimed a causal link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and autism. The U.S. vaccine injury tribunal found, based on research and the testimony of high-profile scientists, that the proposed link between vaccines and autism was not credible. However, the petitioners were unconvinced by what they saw as a single powerful establishment, the government and scientific establishment, squelching those willing to speak out against injustice. Celebrity endorsement increased the fervor.

Subsequent declining vaccination rates caused measles outbreaks and resulted in California’s mandatory vaccination law.

Financial incentives for doctors and mandates, although perhaps ethically questionable, seem to have been effective in combating anti-vax sentiment. Only presenting scientific facts, on the other hand, has been less successful. As Anna Kirkland states in her analysis of credibility in the MMR trials, science “does not have a magical power to change minds,” and often results in a knee-jerk hardening of previously held beliefs. Instead, effective pro-vaccination messaging shows graphic injury, particularly to children, which could be prevented by vaccination.

THE NEW ANTI-VAX Since old anti-vax rhetoric — minimizing the disease threat, claiming the vaccine causes illness or does not work, and claiming the vaccine is part of a conspiracy — is resurfacing with respect to the COVID-19 vaccine, we might be tempted to respond with pro-vaccine messaging that has worked in the past. However, we must adjust for two reasons: The people are different, and the process is different.

THE PEOPLE There are, of course, the familiar anti-vaxxers, who spoke up as early as February with concerns about a mandatory vaccine.

There are also new groups. One is connected to far-right extremism and conspiracy theories (about the virus and otherwise).

The other, termed “vaccine-hesitant,” is more surprising. It includes members of the opposite demographic — highly educated, liberal, not libertarian — who are concerned about the safety of the expedited vaccine development process, especially under President Trump. A Pew poll supports the existence of both new categories. While a majority of those unwilling to get a vaccine are Republicans, 42% of Democrats agree with them, and unwillingness to vaccinate is tied to lack of confidence in its safety.

Parting COVID-anti-vaxxers into two groups which slot neatly into our current party split is easy, particularly in light of the overt politicization of the issue during both presidential campaigns. On the right, President Trump promotes conspiracy theories. He said the virus will “go away without a vaccine,” claimed that hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment, and suggested Americans inject disinfectant. On the cautious-left, Kamala Harris said “if Donald Trump tells us to take [a vaccine], I won’t,” and Chris Wallace pointedly asked Joe Biden if his cam-

paign was contributing to the widespread fear of a vaccine.

Off the debate stage, in the lives of real Americans, the issue is more complex than red against blue. Some fall into a “middle ground,” making their own risk assessment about the vaccine, politics aside. Hall said “I feel healthy. I feel that I’m not immunocompromised. So if I’m going to get this virus, I think I would have a chance to fight it — as opposed to getting the vaccine,” which she worries might have unknown adverse effects. Hall is otherwise pro-vaccine, and she does not support Donald Trump.

Kreider holds a similar view: “I think you’ll see a lot of people that will be supportive of [a vaccine] because there are a lot of people that are very afraid of COVID. And it’s not that I’m not afraid of the disease — I think it needs to be taken seriously, and I think there are precautions that we need to hold.” However, she believes the vaccine is “far too rushed,” and she made it clear that individuals should be able to make their own choices relating to the virus. “Do I [not wear a mask]? No. Do I think people should be damned because of it? No!” THE PROCESS Having identified who is concerned about the vaccine, we can turn to what there is, or is not, to fear.

Operation Warp Speed, the collaboration between various departments of the federal government and industry, impacts the speed of development but not the speed of approval. “Rather than eliminating steps from traditional development timelines, steps will proceed simultaneously,” the Department of Health and Human Services website states, which “increases the financial risk, but not the product risk.”

The change in rigor of requirements for approval would come with an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). An EUA allows use of unapproved medical products during a public health emergency when there are no alternatives. EUA requirements are based on a risk-benefit analysis, the specifics of which for this case were recently debated and eventually published. The most contested factor was the required follow-up time, how long vaccine companies must monitor vaccinated individuals before the EUA is approved. Follow-ups for a normal vaccine run at least 6 months, and often up to 3 years.

The report specifies two months (also recommended by experts), which at the time of publication took the promise of a vaccine before election day off the table. That should increase public confidence. So should the fact that the committee session reviewing the vaccine materials will be almost entirely open, excluding possible proprietary information related to manufacturing.

That being said, public health experts are asking ethical questions about an EUA, and some have stated outright that we should proceed under expanded access (usually used to make treatments available to very ill people, notably during the AIDS epidemic) rather than EUA status. Two of the leading vaccines are gene-based, a totally new technology that has never been used in an FDA approved vaccine. Anti-vax individuals are backed by evidence more than ever before. Which begs the question: Could they be right?

LOOKING FORWARD Let’s go back to basics. Pro-vaccine social norms matter.

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HINDSIGHT 2020

Vaccinations work best as a tool to reach herd immunity, not an individual preventive measure. When a population reaches the herd immunity threshold, there are so few people who can contract the disease that it spreads very slowly. This protects people who have chronic illness, are too young or old to be vaccinated, or whose vaccine was not effective. Thresholds typically fall between 70% and 90%. One projection of the herd immunity threshold for COVID-19 is 66%, but many experts say we do not know enough about COVID-19 to make a conclusive statement.

If we rely on vaccination to reach herd immunity, we must convince more people to vaccinate than are currently willing.

For the old anti-vaxxers, graphic injury-focused messaging worked. Unfortunately, that will likely prove ineffective here.

The vaccine must be taken by many who would likely experience asymptomatic COVID-19, who would face a fatality rate below 0.05%. Compared to commonly vaccinated for illnesses such as meningitis, which has a fatality rate of 10% and symptoms like limb loss and brain damage, COVID-19 is simply less scary for most age cohorts. Influenza is the most similar commonly vaccinated-for illness, but the uptake is low, just 45% in 2017-18.

And the flu vaccine itself is not the subject of public doubt.

If convincing individuals to vaccinate is the right thing to do, how would we do it? Andrew Heinrich, of the Yale School of Public Health, said sequencing will be critical in an interview with the HPR. He suggested offering the vaccine to vulnerable communities first, such as health care workers and individuals from hardest-hit geographical areas, who will “view very differently the prospect of getting a vaccine because of the urgency their community feels.” As others see these groups vaccinated, Heinrich believes trust in the vaccine will grow. This strategy also mitigates the moral dilemma, because there will be more time for the vaccine to gain a positive track record before the unwilling are urged to take it.

If major hesitancy remains after people start getting vaccinated, we should consider the four sects of COVID-anti-vaxxers individually and target messaging to each.

First, the “old anti-vaxxers” could be a lost cause. Giving a group which already did not trust the system renewed (and more legitimate) reasons for their beliefs does not bode well, especially when traditionally effective messaging will not suffice.

The good news is that with a 90% effective vaccine, a fringe antivax group should not disrupt our ability to reach herd immunity.

Second, for the “vaccine-hesitant,” focus on the new president and the relative safety of the vaccine. Also, add reminders of the social responsibility to save lives, current social norms around pandemic behavior (much like the initial lockdown messaging), and already firmly held beliefs about why vaccination is the right thing to do.

Third, the “conspiracy theorists” might respond well to an appeal to economics. While perhaps they do not believe in COVID-19, they do believe lockdowns have taken a massive economic toll on the nation. Heinrich suggested public health officials explain that “this is what we need to do to get back to work— [many people] might acquiesce under that circumstance.” In addition, a reminder of how the speedy vaccine process represents the best of American ingenuity and economic prowess (Pfizer’s headquarters are in New York, Biontech’s Massachusetts) might strike a nationalist chord. Or, posing vaccination as a statement of American toughness might do the trick. If these people do not fear the virus, they should not fear the vaccine, either.

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Fourth, the “middle ground” group requires clear communication of convincing data showing the vaccine makes sense for them. They, too, might respond well to “getting back to work.”

Finally, this group would likely appreciate feeling heard by decision makers, so that public health decisions seem less broadstroke paternalistic and more common sense. Kreider believes that in her home state, Maine, “shutting down is very, very harmful and shutting down without having a good, solid plan is not good for people.” Politicians need to think through any future shutdown plans, she concluded.

What if we convince these groups, but issues with this vaccine destroy the already tattered trust in public health officials and the scientific process? Andy Slavitt, former acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, put it this way: “Done right, vaccines end pandemics. Done wrong, pandemics end vaccines.” This is why, no matter what techniques we use to convince people to receive a vaccine, they must be accompanied by straightforward information.

When I asked Hall what she could tell me about the EUA, she said, “I do not know much about it at this point. I’ve done a little bit of research, but I don’t know exactly everything that’s entailed and what their research is.” The FDA’s new guidelines are public, but they are not designed for a layperson. Now and when the vaccine is released, we need simple, honest discussion of what scientists know and what they do not. That, not partisan blustering, is what builds and maintains public trust in science, and what allows it to function in its highest capacity to improve our health and our lives. 

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:

How American Christianity Became Republicanism

by Amen Gashaw

“I

n America, we don’t turn to government to restore our souls. We put our faith in the almighty God,” said President Donald Trump on the closing night of a Republican National Convention steeped in religious rhetoric. Indeed, August 2020’s convention saw Sister Dierde Byrns espouse a vote for Trump as a vote against abortion and for “eternal life,” while others claimed that Democrats had immorally “challenged” the United States’ “Judeo-Christian tradition.” Over the course of its four-day run, the RNC proceeded to welcome pastors, rabbis, nuns, even anti-abortion activists in attempts to further consolidate the Christian vote, a bloc that makes up 70% of the population, 64% of eligible voters, and 79% of those that lean Republican.

In a national climate that blurs political and religious lines, then, the overwhelming support for Republicans amongst evangelical Christians indicates that the party’s appeals to the Christian right have been largely successful. However, it contradicts national commitments to the separation of church and state and contrasts with the secularization experienced in other developed countries. Moreover, even when candidates seem

to oppose traditional Christian values, like President Trump’s previously salacious lifestyle before assuming office, evangelicals continue to rally behind the Republican cause. Why, then, do American Christianity and Republicanism seem so inextricably intertwined?

Much like religion, politics is as much social as it is governmental. It is passed down from parent to child and is effectively innate, hereditary even, for many U.S. citizens. American Christianity in particular has, for centuries, developed alongside American politics so much so that their conflation would only be natural. Indeed, for many Christians, right-wing partisanship is just as generational, inveterate, and cultural as religion itself.

SO HELP ME GOD: RELIGIOUS SALIENCE AND AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY It is no question that the United States is a nation of at least nominally religious origins, and one that, upon its founding, housed numerous Judeo-Christian minorities: Puritans, Quak-

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HINDSIGHT 2020

ers, Baptists, Jews, among others. Faiths intermingled, shared characteristics, and interacted with their governments overtly only to the extent that they would be allowed to maintain their religious freedom. Indeed, notions of limited interaction between religion and government in the United States date as early as 1644, with Roger Williams’ promulgation of a “wall of separation” between the Church and worldly affairs.

Consequently, early American Christianity was predicated on disestablishment and diversity, an ironic truth when many contemporary religious conservatives subscribe to a dogmatically homogenous and strict construction of the Bible. Even today, as evangelical Christians vote in droves for an increasingly populist Republican party, this evolutionary character remains.

In addition to its cultural context, regional lines also dictated Christianity’s development. The Southeastern United States, for example, was an epicenter for Anglican, Methodist, and Baptist proselytization throughout the nation’s early history. Now known as the “Bible Belt” for its large Christian population, the region has continued to take on a clearly religious tone. Indeed, many of its citizens identify and prioritize their regional identity, claiming to be “Americans” only “by birth,” but “Southern by the Grace of God.” Moreover, the American South has the lowest population of religiously unaffiliated voters, the greatest prevalence of school prayer, the highest proportion of Christians, and the most consistent Republican voting record today, a set of traits which cannot be a coincidence. In the presence of partisan sectionalism, then, if regional solidarity is coupled with providence and if providence is coupled with politics, it is unsurprising that many Southern voters view their identity as Republicans as deeply bound to their identity as Christians.

Of course, the political implications of religion are not isolated to the South. In recent history, the Midwest, where some 73% of the population identifies as Christian, has also long been a conservative stronghold. The 2016 Presidential election additionally saw a Trump-favorable mobilization of blue-collar conservative Catholic voters in the Rust Belt, a bloc of Americans with political leanings similar to the majority Protestant or evangelical Christians in other parts of the nation. Even California maintains “a number of very large [Protestant] churches that have been active in politics,” as Daniel Williams, a professor at the University of West Georgia and author of “God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right,” told the HPR. Conservative Christianity, thus, has managed to remain politically relevant throughout the country and likely informs millions of people as they cast their ballots.

GOD BLESS AMERICA: THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM Mainstream discussions of the influence of Christianity on American politics are often rife with allusions to “evangelical” voters. As such verbiage is integral to the narrative, it would be irresponsible to proceed without adequately defining it. In an interview with the HPR, Dr. Kip Richardson, a historian of religion at Harvard Divinity School, stated that American evangelicalism goes back to the “revivalistic preaching” of the 18th and 19th centuries. In turn, this religious strain has maintained a “thread of social conservatism.” To note, however, evangelical Christianity at large includes demographics, like Black Protestants, who

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vote in proportions of upwards of 90% for Democrats. For this reason, most scholars limit the scope of Christian-conservative study to White evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics.

In the U.S., evangelical Christians have created what Philip Gorski, professor of Sociology and Religion at Yale University and author of “American Babylon,” calls “Christian nationalism.” This ideology’s clients believe that America was built by and for Christians on Christian principles and that its religious identity is the reason for its God-ordained success. For many, the only way to “make America great again” is for a return to Christian hegemony and to the belief that “American democracy is founded on biblical principles … and cannot survive without American Christianity,” as Gorski stated in an interview with the HPR. Indeed, 65% of U.S .citizens believe that identification as a Christian is at least “fairly important” to considering oneself an American.

This association of American institutions with Christian doctrine is by no means a nascent phenomenon. Decades of contentious international politics, especially in the late 20th century, likely bolstered the notion. Embroiled in the Cold War, American political leaders sought overwhelmingly to amplify religious sentiment throughout the nation in attempts to consolidate American identity in the face of communist threats abroad.

Originally, this was not meant to magnify the prevalence of Christianity but rather to encourage the observance of a general “civil religion.”

Despite initial non-sectarian motives, though, the conjunctive efforts of evangelists like the late Rev. Billy Graham and politicians like then-President Eisenhower led to a rise in the prevalence of evangelical Protestantism. This budding form of faith was largely affiliated with loyalty to one’s country and against foreign threats, and its sentiments have persisted decades after the close of the Cold War. Indeed, today, evangelical Protestants constitute the plurality of Christians in the United States at large and the majority of the Republican Party. Thus, patriotism, in addition to prayer and praise, has gradually come to define American Christianity.

A WALL OF COOPERATION: REALIGNMENT AND REPUBLICANISM Perhaps at the root of American Christianity’s movement to the right is the conflation not just of Christianity with Republicanism but of “free markets and free religion,” as Yale professor of religious history Tisa Wenger told the HPR. This notion may find its roots in, as Richardson notes, the Weberian belief that Protestantism embodies the spirits of capitalism, thrift, and modesty. In more contemporary terms, modern Christianity is also rooted in its mid-century identity as a unifying force against communism. Insofar as it is the offspring of these earlier movements, it is possible that evangelical Christianity may, in the perception of its adherents, yield itself to capitalist fiscal conservatism, an ideal which is now one of the defining characteristics of the Republican Party.

Social conservatism and a commitment to family values may also play a role in the Republican Party’s “monopoly on God,” especially when compared to their Democratic counterparts who ostensibly vindicate violent protestors, support abortion, and tout third wave feminism. “The Christian Right has always been

HINDSIGHT 2020

concerned about the moral direction and survival of the nation,” notes Williams, “and in their minds, personal behavior is always linked with a national cause.”

Indeed, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, often credited with clinching the Reagan presidency and putting the religious right on the national stage, was a simultaneously Christian and Republican response to the civil and gay rights movements, gender equality, and secularization of school curriculum and society in general. Many Christians of the late 20th century found their biblical support for male-lead heterosexual marriage and the maintenance of the nuclear family challenged by calls for equality for women and LGBT rights. Even Christian understandings of the creation story were actively undermined by public school systems that increasingly taught evolutionary biology.

The response was a form of Christian separatism, which Darren Dochuk, professor of History at the University of Notre Dame clarifies as separatism from Christianity’s longstanding association with “the Social Gospel,” economic reform, and progressive policies at large in an interview with the HPR. A more somber explanation for the development of the Christian Republicanism may rest, however, in discussions of race. There seems to be a general consensus amongst scholars that, in some significant capacity, race relations played a role in the alignment of White Christians with the Republican Party.

Particularly in the South, where the population of White evangelicals is highest, Wenger and Dochuk state that the Republican fear of big government and support for the privatization of educational institutions took hold as a response to intervention measures undertaken by the state to racially integrate society.

Even respecting tax policy, it’s possible that White Protestant Southerners in the late 20th century deplored the possibility of their tax dollars going to minority communities, leading to their espousal of fiscally “responsible” policies.

The transition of Christianity into Republicanism is, without a doubt, multifaceted, but deeper conversations regarding the potential involvement of race relations may also be necessary. In the words of Dochuk, “it’s about abortion, it’s about the culture wars of the 1970s, but it’s also about resisting the desegregation of schools in the South. This too is a part of the story of the rise of the … evangelical Republican self,” he says. “Yes, race needs to be recentered in our narratives and very much to a tragic degree.” Whatever the case, it is clear that the “wall of separation between Church and State” of which Thomas Jefferson and Roger Williams writes is perhaps only half-built, or is only a fence and not a wall at all. How can two ideologies that have existed and grown concomitantly for centuries ever be truly independent of one another?

addition of a legitimizing reference to the Maker of the Universe.

The aftermath of the 2020 Presidential Election has seen numerous imperious religious figures do just that. Footage of megachurch pastor Paula White praying for the demise of demonic voter fraud recently went viral following the week of November 3rd. Moreover, soon after the AP called the election for Joe Biden, millionaire televangelist Kenneth Copeland was recorded laughing in hysterics at the prospect of a Biden presidency. When met with such footage, however, one should know that it is likely more indicative of Christian leaders’ Republican ties than it is of their Christianity.

If faith itself were the sole initiator of right-leaning partisanship, every Christian would vote red, but that is overwhelmingly not the case. There remains a sizable, albeit smaller, religious left, which despite lacking the same organizing power as its conservative counterpart, does contribute to the political narrative from time to time. It’s clear, then, that Christianity at large, even within the United States, institutionally and ideologically spans a wide array of concerns, from racial injustice to poverty.

Even so, it’s unlikely that Christian rhetoric will disappear from politics. Richardson tells us: Republicans have found that it earns them reelection and Democrats, in their sparse usage of it, have found that it makes them less liable to accusations of antireligion. Christianity, then, is a tool just as much as it is a faith and those who vote with the intention of adhering to the will of God should know: Their ballot has no salvific power, their candidates are not prophets, and when politicians invoke the name of the Lord, it is likely not with spirituality in mind. 

ONE NATION UNDER GOD: THE PERSISTENCE OF THE POLITICO-RELIGIOUS RELATIONSHIP When Florida Representative Ted Yoho was called to the House floor to apologize for referring to Alexandrai Ocasio Cortes as a “f------ b----” on the steps of the Capitol, he instead turned to more religiously charged language, stating, “I will not apologize for my passion, or for loving my God, my family, or my country.” His words were surprising to many who could not imagine a version of God, Christian or otherwise, who would endorse such behavior, but statements like his are far from uncommon. It is easy, after all, to justify partisan animosities with the

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HINDSIGHT 2020

A New Genre: Empathy, Soun Creation Amid Pandemic 2

020 was projected to be a massive year for the music industry. The culmination of a steady rise in ticket sales meant that the year was set to be the largest grossing ever in terms of live music, with more tickets sold than ever before.

In an industry that over the years has become increasingly reliant on live music sales as a main revenue source and where the consumption of actual recorded music has taken the backseat as a loss leader in terms of profit, these projected sales were central to the industry’s other successes as well. Indeed, more than 50% of the $50 billion industry’s revenue comes from live music, and it has been this revenue that largely fuels labels and artists’ own incomes.

“This was going to be the biggest year ever,” said Jeff Dorenfeld in an interview with the HPR. After decades of experience in the industry, from time spent managing multi-platinum bands like Boston to touring with acts like Sammy Hagar and Ozzy Osbourne, Dorenfeld now works as a professor at Berklee College of Music.

“All of that is based on the fact that in the last 20 years, more genres can sell out arenas,” he said. “For years and years there have always been genres getting lots of airplay, but they weren’t

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able to do arenas and stadiums. … [But now] all these genres have major artists. That’s never been true before.”

A couple decades ago, it was only rock or pop artists who could garner the fanbase needed to fill up the tens of thousands of seats in an arena. Now, access to recorded music has been increasingly democratized through streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, which has made it easy for anyone to listen to a massive library of music and thus foster increasingly diverse tastes.

Genre has also become increasingly fluid in recent years because of these platforms, as seen in the work of established industry firebrands like Billie Eilish and Harry Styles. In fact, 78%of young people say they cannot be defined by a single genre they listen to. “We’re moving towards a far more genre-fluid, genre-less environment … because the melding of influences across genres has become so prevalent,” said Robert Weitzner, a professor at Drexel University who focuses on the intersections of technology and music, in an interview with the HPR. That has meant that countless more genres have been able to gain enough relevance and increase their fan bases to the point that they, too, could sell out entire arenas. In the lead up to 2020,

HINDSIGHT 2020

nd, and d the

by Sofia Andrade

many of them were beginning to.

As has been the case with many industries, however, the pandemic has pushed the music industry past the brink of “business-as-usual” and into a realm of extreme uncertainty. For months, planned summer releases were pushed back to account for these “strange and unprecedented times.” Concerts, too, were postponed a couple months, then a year, and then cancelled altogether.

The pandemic “really took [the music industry] down to nothing,” said Dorenfeld. “I mean, every festival was canceled.

Every tour was cancelled. Every show was cancelled. Every club was cancelled. Everything.”

Even just a six-month shutdown in live music was expected to cost the industry over $10 billion. Now, It has been well over six months since live music has been able to exist as it once did, and losses keep building up dramatically.

Despite these mass cancelations, artists have done what they do best and have gotten creative with regards to performing their music. In place of concerts and festivals, the pandemic has brought to the fore a myriad ways for artists to engage with their fanbases. From Zoom meet-and-greets to live-streamed con-

certs, artists and label executives alike have sought out new ways to satisfy eager consumers. One of the biggest musical events of the coronavirus-era, for example, was a livestream event by Korean pop band BTS that made over $20 million in profit.

Many artists have also taken to writing music in and about isolation. Musicians as disparate as Pitbull and Charli XCX released music that was both written and recorded during the early stages of coronavirus quarantine. And from Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber’s “Stuck with U” to Tyga and Curtis Roach’s Tik Tok anthem “Bored in the House,” the theme of physical isolation — however trite — prevailed for much of the summer.

In many ways, this “new genre” spurred on by the coronavirus — a sort of “pandemic pop” rooted in themes of isolation and uncertainty — is not so much a genre in the traditional sense that it has a unified musicality and instrument base. Instead, it is a genre formed from the combination of an introspective creative process and relatable, empathetic messaging — and one that proves uniquely positioned to reflect and serve the COVID era that artists now create in.

The very experience of creating in isolation, however, is not a wholly new phenomenon.Indie artist Fenne Lily’s critically

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HINDSIGHT 2020

acclaimed sophomore album, “BREACH,” which was released in mid-September, was written mostly while in a self-imposed, prepandemic period of isolation. After months of touring in support of her debut album, “On Hold,” Lily chose to take refuge for about a month in a Berlin hotel room in the hopes that a drastic change of pace and scenery would bring about an increased connection with her own self.

After “On Hold” focused mostly on romantic relationships, “it felt like a natural step to start writing more about my own relationship with my mind, and my surroundings and my family,” Lily said in an interview with the HPR. Soon enough, however, the pandemic meant that an otherwise uncommon experience became undeniably prescient: “When I took myself away to Berlin to start writing by myself, I kind of thought that was a unique position to be in,” she said of the now commonplace experience of self-isolation.

“Nobody that I knew at the time had taken a month away from the society that they were used to … and now [the record] has been released into a world that is very similar to the world that I chose to put myself into during that period.”

Standing now as an early blueprint for this new pandemicinduced genre, much of the songwriting throughout the powerfully honest record is rooted in Lily’s experience of isolation and introspection. Songs like “Someone Else’s Trees,” for example, exist as thoughtful reflections on the intersections of family, isolation, and the self. Pulling from the time Lily almost died as a child and her mother’s reaction to it, the track’s heart-wrenching honesty is levied by lyrical confessions that can only arise from being alone. “I’m not afraid to die / More so to be alive / I know in this and more I’m not alone,” Lily sings over soft guitar strumming. The lyrics, paired with the hollow production of the track and the aching harmonies that cushion Lily’s voice, give listeners the sense that the song is one which could have only been created from a place of solitude.

In alignment with the new genre brought about by today’s pandemic-induced isolation, the song seems to be built on both the empathy that Lily feels towards her mother (“And I never heard you scream until the night I couldn’t breathe”) and the empathy she feels towards herself. She admits to fearing life more than death, but gives herself the same type of comforting reassurance that most now turn to amid the pandemic: she is not alone. The track then serves as a reflection of vulnerability amid isolation, while providing listeners with the comfort of knowing that said vulnerability is welcome through introspection, not pushed away.

On another track, “I Used To Hate My Body But Now I Just Hate You,” Lily explores the relationship she has with herself through reflections on a past romantic relationship. “I still see you as some kind of reassurance / That someday I’ll be understood,” she sings, recognizing the ways that the relationship wasn’t perfect, but acknowledges the faults without the usual daggers of a break-up song. She’s honest with herself and her past, a feeling only furthered by the song’s open, simple instrumentation. The track is candid to the point of breaking, a result of the possibilities offered by isolation.

Just as the Berlin isolation shifted Lily’s relationship to the world and the self, so has the pandemic catalyzed a similar shift in other artists’ relationships. The pandemic has changed, too, the very representation of relationships that musicians show in their art. The new genre has shifted to move away from hyper-

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saturated, sugary tracks to more empathetic, pandemic-induced musings and relaxing music.

The shift is seen even on the level of streaming platforms, where nearly a third of Americans get their music. “We’ve seen some massive shifts in user behavior,” Spotify’s Chief Executive Daniel Ek said of the change in listening patterns early on in the pandemic. “People are listening more to classical and chill music.”

As exemplified by Taylor Swift’s “Folklore,” which stayed at the top of the Billboard charts for five consecutive weeks, the albums that people have been drawn to during this age of isolation are those which are stripped down, raw, and empathetic. Rather than sing about her own former flames and desires, as she is known to do, Swift’s new genre release centers itself around the stories of others, told through lilting acoustic melodies and lowkey, folk-style production.

“I mean, you can’t put out a big top stadium-oriented album in the middle of a pandemic. … And artists are going through the same isolation, loneliness, and upside down living that we’re all going through, and their job is to express that,” said Weitzner.

“That is a more stripped down and intimate and lonely kind of experience for everybody. So that’s naturally going to be part of the creative process for the next couple of years.”

As evidenced by Swift, artists working in this new genre are turning inwards, sharing stories that reflect the good amid the chaos. Still, the sense of powerlessness that comes with living during a pandemic has meant that many feel less motivated to continuously create amid the countless converging crises that have come to define the year 2020. At a time when more and more countries are going back into lockdown, death rates are at record levels, and world leaders fail to heed science’s warnings to keep the coronavirus under control, to write music in the same style and quantity as prior to the pandemic — endless songs about going out to a bar on a Saturday night, for example — can feel forced and disingenuine.

“Being a dick isn’t cool anymore,” Lily said, paraphrasing fellow indie artist Frances Quinlan from rock band Hop Along.

“Nowadays, it’s cool to be introspective and emotionally intelligent, and I think just subconsciously it will fall into music.”

The new genre is bedrocked on that very shift to introspection and emotional intelligence, as it forwards the empathy-driven messaging that categorizes the new genre.

For Lily, this shift has manifested in a desire to tell more interpersonal stories. “For me, music has always been a reflection directly of what’s happening in my life,” she said of her usual writing process. “But because nothing is happening in my life, ...

I’m going to have to start reflecting things that aren’t necessarily directly happening.”

“Elliott,” the fourth song off of “BREACH,” was the first song Lily wrote that wasn’t directly rooted in her own experience. Instead, what started off as a song about a man she met at a hardware shop who had become disillusioned with his rock star ambitions soon evolved to include her father’s story as well.

Rather than focus on Lily’s personal struggles and emotions, “Elliott” exists as a sonic patchwork of other people’s experiences as seen through her eyes, making it a radical show of empathy.

When not much is happening in the immediate, personal realm, these outward-facing tracks serve as an exercise in minimizing the distance between relationships, both for the writer and the listener. In a pandemic characterized by an overwhelm-

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ing sense of isolation and loneliness, such empathy is necessitated and widely embraced by artists working in the new genre’s framework of honest messaging and introspective creative processes.

“I think as much as this pandemic has made people feel isolated, it’s also introduced the expectation that you will be empathetic to people. … By just wearing a mask, you’re showing that you care about other people to an extent,” Lily said. “So I think that that empathy and involvement in other people’s experience is something that will naturally work its way into my music more, because it’s a daily practice.”

Unlike the period of isolation Lily committed herself to when “BREACH” was written, the pandemic brings real-world consequences and no end-date or ability to be controlled — all factors which make the role of meaningful music and the new genre that much more important.

“I think, especially at a time of upheaval, music that makes you feel comforted and supported and not judged and understood has more of a place in the world. And I think that that will definitely continue the harder the shit gets,” said Lily. “I think there’s almost kind of responsibility for art to be a space where things don’t have to be difficult and cruel and polarizing.”

Especially now, as any sense of an end to the pandemic continues to slip further and further away, people need to feel connected in some way to the art they’re consuming. The shift to more deliberate and meaningful music-making then, to this new genre that centers itself around empathy and kindness — like the work of Fenne Lily does — serves as the much-needed zeitgeist and beacon of hope for an era battered by crisis.

“I hope that there’s imagination and escapism in the music that I make and that other people will be making the future,” Lily said. “Because to be reminded of this year? It’s not something that I’m excited for.” 

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On the Border

by Sama Kubba

C

hronic state failures and mass atrocities have characterized 20th-century Latin American history. At the same time, one of the first human rights doctrines of our world came out of the region in 1948, beating the United Nations by more than six months. The resilience of Latin American communities through brutality and suffering is reflected in their political realities today — every style of governance is each society’s unique response to the trauma their nation has encountered.

After a left-leaning “Pink Tide” swept the region in the early 2000s, the pendulum swung back towards right-wing parties.

In 2020, several societies have responded in favor of right-wing parties, and the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Luis Lacalle Pou in Uruguay highlighted the growing importance of economic stability and crime in the electorate.

Now, the COVID-19 pandemic presents the new challenge of public health. In this era, the disease has put these systems of governance to the test, challenging their ability to provide for the general welfare. While Uruguay’s bold COVID-19 response

16 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW WINTER 2020

has helped it thrive, Brazil’s politicization and dismissal of the disease has taken the lives of millions. Bolsonaro’s reaction has been devastating to Brazilians with more than 6 million cases and 170,000 deaths as of November 2020. On the other hand, Uruguay has had a relatively successful COVID-19 response.

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) team of Dr. Wilson Benia, Specialist in Health Systems and Services; Giovanni Escalante Guzmán, international public health senior advisor; and Dr. Andrés Bálsamo from the Epidemiology Division told the HPR in an email interview that as of November 11, Uruguay had 3,620 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 62 deaths, one of the lowest case tolls in the world.

This raises the question: What accounts for the differences in these countries when they share striking historical similarities, not to mention a prevalence of right-wing parties? The stories of right-wing resilience in both Brazil and Uruguay are a testament to the importance of proper political leadership and attitude towards public health policy. Uruguay’s successful empowerment of scientists has allowed it to handle the COVID-19

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crisis relatively well, especially compared to Brazil’s politicization of the topic.

DECENTRALIZATION AS A SAVING GRACE Brazil is an interesting case study for its institutional design and the impact of leadership on the utilization of a universal public health system. Michael Lago, the executive director of the Institute for Health Policy Studies, explains in an interview with the HPR that a health care system is important, but so are the people running it. Brazil has a universal health system, a point for pride for the nation, but Lago explains that the success of this system relies on the right politicians to uphold, enforce and utilize the right health policies. What Lago is describing is a situation where even with an adequate public health system, it’s up to politicians to actually utilize it through effective coordination of public health policies.

Lago sheds light on the positive aspects of the decentralization of the public health system, the Sistema Único de Saúde.

Even though this decentralization could impede nationwide health efforts, Lago described it as saving grace with Bolsonaro in charge of the federal government because it allowed state governors the freedom to react differently and institute appropriate measures. For example, cities in northern regions of Brazil such as Manaus had a serious approach to COVID-19 because the city’s mayor took the threat very seriously and activated the city’s health system in response. In addition, Brazil’s Bolsa Familia program for families provides a basic income of 600 reais (around $112) to account for the widespread loss of work and has aided in promoting stay-at-home-orders.

However, COVID-19 has also exposed the gaps in Brazil’s decentralized system because of its lack of attention to unequal geographic distribution. “The COVID crisis is a great illustration on how this decentralized system is important, but also why it fails,” Lago explained. Despite the basic income, Lago notes individuals in less privileged areas often live more tightly and in unhygienic conditions due to poverty, making social distancing and other hygienic to combat COVID-19 nearly impossible. This can also impact resource distribution.

For example, in the Amazonian region, where the more advanced treatments needed for COVID-19 are concentrated in the city, a shortage of physicians and ICU beds has led to the collapse of health services. Such a problem preceded the pandemic, as Lago explains that wealthier regions have always had better access to healthcare, so COVID-19 has only exacerbated this disparity in resource distribution.

Most broadly, the federal government’s failure to prioritize public health is mainly responsible for Brazil’s failure to contain COVID-19. Bolsonaro’s reaction has been devastating to Brazilians with more than 6 million cases and 170,000 deaths as of November 2020. Bolsonaro dismissed the virus as a threat, instead saying Brazilians need to stop being “sissies.” Even after Bolsonaro’s own bout with COVID-19, he continues to ignore any proactive public health measures, despite professional health advice. “Brazil has invested less than 4% of its GDP on public health, which is nothing in comparison to other universal health systems,” explained Lago. “The UK, for instance, has almost 8%. If you look at France and Germany, it’s almost 10%.”

Even with a universal healthcare system aimed at providing access to all, it takes the right government leadership to address

disparities and ensure the system meets its potential. This is especially challenging, however, when health is politicized and turned into a political strategy. Lago notes that politicians like Bolsonaro have created a “false dilemma” between public health and economic success. For example, the Brazilian president has repeatedly claimed that COVID-19 restrictions would come at an economic cost, a relationship that essentially stresses saving the economy over saving lives. “It’s really scary that, for a specific electoral purpose, a politician could do so much harm to the country,” says Lago. “That’s also why I think we need a more autonomous health systems, rather than harmful leadership.”

URUGUAY: SMALL COUNTRY, BIG RESPONSE One of Brazil’s neighbors has had quite a different experience. In a country that is known for its impressive egalitarianism and liberated social atmosphere, Uruguay has handled the pandemic relatively well. Despite most measures not being mandatory, Uruguay’s political culture has allowed for the compliance that COVID-19 needed. The experts from the PAHO explained that Uruguay has fared relatively well in response to COVID-19 due to the strength of its pre-existing public health infrastructure and the leadership of politicians and health experts to enact policies that utilize as well as enhance the ability of the healthcare system.

Similar to Brazil, the team explained that Uruguay’s law mandates a “right to health,” serving as the premise for its country’s primary healthcare benefits programs. But now, with COVID-19, the execution of this mandate has been quite different from Brazil, as it has led to efforts that aim to ensure adequate healthcare access and clear communication of pandemic guidelines. In particular, Uruguay instituted a number of innovative policies: They allowed home care in certain cases and instituted a telemedicine system. In all, Uruguay successfully promoted a unitary recommendation, “#Quedateencasa” (stay at home), centralized transparent data, and provided contact tracing. Combined with their low population density, these measures can explain Uruguay’s commendable approach to COVID-19.

CLOSE IN GEOGRAPHY, FAR IN REACTION How could a country so geographically close to Brazil be so far in its COVID-19 response? The team notes it was due to “great leadership in managing the epidemic from the Ministry of Public Health and the Presidency.” In other words, we can look to the choice of leaders to enact a comprehensive health system. At first, it may appear that the discrepancy between Uruguay and Brazil lies in Bolsonaro’s right-wing populist politics, but Kathryn Sikkink, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School who lived in Uruguay during the first several months of the pandemic, reveals that there’s actually a bit more to the story.

Sikkink explained that a leftist coalition called Frente Amplio (Broad Front) governed Uruguay up until 2020; this coalition expanded healthcare, education, and labor rights for individuals. “Part of Uruguay’s success isn’t just things they did in 2020, it’s the fact that they have a strong health care system, a strong education system, and a large middle class,” Sikkink

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HINDSIGHT 2020

said. Interestingly, despite being welfare states with their universal health care promises, a right-wing party now governs in Uruguay, with Frente Amplio losing to the center-right National Party in 2020, before the onslaught of COVID-19. But while Bolsonaro is an opponent of science, “the Health Minister and the government [of Uruguay] decided that they would have tried to have a policy based on science,” explained Sikkink.

“Colleagues of mine at the university said that, to their surprise, the Health Minister came to health experts at the university and said he wanted to learn from them.”

Right-wing politicians letting science guide their decisionmaking in Uruguay contrasts with the Brazilian right’s denial of COVID-19. “Uruguay was never polarized in the way the United States is polarized right now, or Brazil [is] polarized,” Sikkink said. “There’s still a respect for experts.” In other words, public health is not a politically salient issue in Uruguay and so politicians haven’t stifled experts, instead, these experts speak up and leverage their public health system in a stronger way.

On the other side of things, another major contributor to Uruguay’s success is its people’s response. “Uruguayans have a higher level of trust in government, so the government policy called was virtually all voluntary,” noted Sikkink, “and because there was higher trust in the government, then people kind of did what the government asked.” In addition to trusting their government, Sikkink explains that Uruguay is a well-educated and relatively equitable society, thus leading to less poverty — something that Lago earlier pointed out was an important favor in COVID-19 compliance capability. Going forward, Sikkink fears that although Uruguay’s response was impressive, its success is threatened by Brazil’s dangerous situation. In fact, the PAHO team described the border area with Brazil as Uruguay’s “greatest risk” because of its highly porous nature. “It could be that Uruguay just won’t be able to escape its geography,” warns Sikkink.

Will the hardships of COVID-19 be the hardships of its vaccination era?

A pandemic doesn’t know borders, a pandemic doesn’t know politics and a pandemic certainly doesn’t know health policy.

If it’s one thing we can learn from Uruguay’s nonpartisan response, it’s that the COVID-19 response should be based on science, not politics. It’s up to political leaders to decide to let scientists and public health experts lead the way in COVID-19 response and with vaccines now a possibility, the leadership of experts will be more important than ever before due to the logistical and medical challenges they bring. Factors such as societal equality, a strong healthcare system, and political leadership are going to significantly impact if, when and how vaccines are distributed and more importantly, who gets them.

But those are only as important as the decisions of their political leaders. Brazil’s geographic inequality and decentralization could plague vaccination efforts and Uruguay now faces a steady increase in case numbers, which both the PAHO team and Sikkink warned about due to its porous border with Brazil.

Even though this pandemic has required a strong domestic response, politicians must now look to their regional counterparts and coordinate a cooperative response that ensures the success of all involved parties. Uruguay might have been doing well,

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but now, Uruguayan politicians must work with Brazilians to maintain that success. Scientists have done their part. Now, it’s up to politicians to do theirs. 

CAMPUS

Do My Professors’ Politics Matter?

by Sofia Andrade

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arvard is a private institution, and does not have to abide by federal guidelines on free speech. In fact, since April 14, 1970, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has adopted its own Resolution of Rights and Responsibilities, an approximately one-page statement which gives the University special autonomy to ensure dissent plays a vital role in its existence. It states that “freedom of speech and academic freedom” are personal rights upon which the community is based.

Since 1970, this issue has only gotten more complex. Two decades later, the university published seven more pages of free speech guidelines to supplement the resolution; these guidelines are linked to the current faculty webpage and “apply to all gatherings under the auspices of the FAS,” though they do not have formal jurisdiction over classroom procedures because “the teacher should be the one who determines the agenda of discourse in the classroom.” The guidelines state that there are

“obligations of respect for others that underlie rational discourse.” As with Harvard’s racial harassment and Title IX policies, this document forbids “racial, sexual, and intense personal harassment … prevent rational discourse. Behavior evidently intended to dishonor … race, gender, ethnic group, religious belief or sexual orientation is contrary to the pursuit of inquiry and education.” This kind of disrespect can be “punished.”

Earlier this semester, students argued that the white supremacist ideologies in Government 50 preceptor David Kane’s alleged posts on a private blog merited his firing. Notably, this situation underscored that there are no pre-established procedures for a professor’s right to free speech off campus or before their term as Harvard faculty. In these instances of ambiguity, how should policy be actionalized?

Freedom of speech in theory does not mean that words have no consequences, especially in relation to how students perceive

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CAMPUS relationships with faculty. In order to better understand how students felt about their professor’s political views, the HPR gathered opinions from 150 Harvard students through an anonymous survey. This sample is not large or representative enough to draw conclusions about the Harvard population, but interesting trends in this limited sample size — as well as anonymous replies to an optional prompt to share any feelings at the end of the survey — raise important questions about the student body: How relevant are professors’ political opinions for students? Do students engage with professors with differing political views?

How do students navigate long standing traditions and classroom dynamics that give professors power over them? Such questions may be helpful to inform improved university policy following this semester’s events.

RELEVANCE OF PROFESSORS’ POLITICAL VIEWS Given that university policy focuses exclusively on faculty’s right to free speech when they are affiliated with the university, can an individual separate their political opinions outside of Harvard or views in the past from their current actions and speech within campus and class?

Considering the widespread outrage following the allegations of Kane’s racist blog posts, it appears students might not believe so. Teaching fellows who worked closely with Kane to create and structure course content wrote they were in “shock, disbelief, and disgust” and condemned the materials posted on Kane’s blog site. Over 500 students and 20 student organizations signed a petition expressing that they were “appalled at the permittance of racist, sexist, and damaging ideologies associated with and potentially authored by Preceptor David Kane.”

Following this, the government department changed concentration requirements to allow Gov 51 in place of Gov 50, extended the drop deadline without a fee and hosted an open town hall to listen to student concerns. Imai Kosuke was appointed the new course head of Gov 50 and nearly all students now choose to attend TF-led lectures.

This outrage initially seems to contradict survey results: When students were asked how relevant their professors’ political views were on a one to five scale, there was an even distribution of rankings from one to five across all concentrators. Two-thirds of students reported they were indifferent and did not feel disadvantaged when a professor did not share their political beliefs. Exceptions were largely based on classes’ grading structure: Humanities courses are known for more subjective grading and concentrations dealing with political science (government, social studies) at Harvard tend to consistently lean left, explaining why concentrators in these subjects considered their professor’s politics more important. Students might be interested in social science sub-specialities like immigrants’ or trans rights or advocating for sex workers, topics that cannot be taught by conventionally conservative professors given that their ideology often delegitimizes these topics from being fields of genuine academic inquiry.

The fallacy is that STEM or otherwise skills-based courses like Kane’s data science class are politics-free. But even these professors need to be cognizant of politics, for it can explicitly connect to course content or their applications: How can eugenics be complicit in evolutionary biology research and vice versa?

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How can computer algorithms be subtly racist? If a professor teaching a pre-medical subject does not believe in trans rights, how can they help aspiring physicians understand the necessity of sex reassignment surgeries?

Students may be indifferent to political views because they do not realize how their education is being subtly politicized and how personal politics affects teaching in ways we underestimate all the time. Beyond explicit racism, far-left students noted the problem that neoliberal professors in humanities or general education courses still do not give considerable weight to anti-colonial, intersectional, non-White thought. These students add that disagreements can tangibly cost you, given the teacher-student power dynamic allows teachers to dictate your grades, recommendations, and well-being in a classroom. Diversity in thought is rendered useless if this power dynamic means students only transiently mold their beliefs to match their professors for grades or validation, as opposed to genuinely engaging with a view different than their own.

In the Kane controversy, this is complicated because white supremacy may not be viewed as a “political” question at all, but rather one of basic human dignity. As such, student outrage may indeed not contradict with a climate of students’ otherwise selfreported indifference to political views.

HOW VOCAL ARE PROFESSORS? Given that teaching is necessarily politicized, what politics should a teacher reveal and how? In the survey, students generally emphasized that diversity in thought was important, and that it is difficult to make arguments against diversity in thought in principle. However, when it comes to actually interacting with professors with different political views, the same percent of students reported comfort or indifference as the percent who reported discomfort.

Survey respondents overwhelmingly responded that professors currently most often speak about politics as it relates to course content, and that they also preferred that professors only discuss politics as it relates to course content — although the level of outspokenness was difficult to decipher based on qualitative measures in the survey like being “very” vocal versus “moderately” vocal. This politicization of class discussion might explain unusually high stress during election week, according to the Undergraduate Council’s recent survey, when an unavoidable political event unrelated to (most) courses’ content shaped student experiences.

During such discussions, particular political issues may be raised. An anonymous reply distinguished between two examples: that someone thinking low taxes and high military spending are good is unconventional for the Harvard population, but still does not interfere with their teaching ability, while a view that women are responsible for sexual assault is explicitly sexist and will translate to treating some students worse than others. Another response noted that we can debate if the Affordable Care Act is the most effective model for healthcare or how highly the 1% should be taxed, but we cannot debate about which race is the most intelligent, or if the wage gap exists, or if victims of sexual violence invite it. The latter infringes on the lived experiences of students, denies facts and creates a hostile environment for learning and teaching.

Ideologies that are explicitly racist or sexist and result in

CAMPUS unfair treatment of particular groups of students are easy to argue, but the less “-ist” or “-phobic” views that are nevertheless controversial must be rational and still grounded within the realms of academic uncertainty. After all, academia currently has a rigorous process to ensure work is scientifically sound, ranging from peer review or replication studies. Some questions reach a broad consensus, others remain open to debate between two or more likely answers, and still others are simply deemed unanswerable.

As an anonymous respondent put it, “If a professor claims that wealth taxes have not been historically enforceable because tax evasion is difficult to trace across international banks, the academic research is not clear here. If the disagreement is unfounded and involves dangerous pseudoscientists who believe in eugenics, this is much less permissible.”

The challenging conundrum occurs when views that are not any obvious form of “-ist” or “-phobic” are both within the realms of academic uncertainty and can still be construed as harmful: For example, does a belief in high military spending inherently also mean a professor upholds settler-colonialist views that are violent toward students from marginalized communities who are victim to America’s military conquests? Even if they hold this view, does their treatment of an individual differ, including how they answer questions in class or offer them advice in office hours? Does a professor saying that a student would be murdered in rural China given her gender identity as a trans woman abuse teacher-student power dynamics even if the statement is factually correct?

RACISM, SEXISM AND WHITE SUPREMACY Returning to the realm of less ambiguous personal politics, professors who have historically held allegedly racist, sexist or white supremacist views have been critcized but not necessarily fired at institutions like Harvard.

Harvard psychology professor and Democrat Steven Pinker has been accused of racial insensitivity for tweeting “Data: Police don’t shoot blacks disproportionately. Problem: Not race, but too many police shootings,” with a link to an article about the frequency of police interaction with different racial groups. He has also publicly written about and participates in discussions of innate differences between sexes and racial/ethnic groups, claiming the political left’s insistence that certain subjects are off-limits has not been productive and underscoring the importance of free speech. His data-driven work has been severely criticized, similar to how Murray and Kane’s work was criticized.

Conservative Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield prides himself on not using trigger warnings in his classroom and holds several controversial views about affirmative action and rape culture. In an interview with the Boston Magazine, he stated: “I think—and this is something I get attacked for—the coming of Black students in great numbers was a factor in the arrival of grade inflation,” as well as that “it seems in women’s sexuality that they find it much more difficult to walk away from an encounter than a man does without being upset.”

What do the Pinkers, Mansfields, and Kanes of higher learning mean for students? Just because people with potentially racist or sexist views exist in the world, should students be taught by them? I would respond to criticism that Harvard is a far-left bubble or that university education is dominated by Democrat

professors by questioning: Is a potentially insular education more detrimental than exposure to potentially bigoted views?

Though education should involve discomfort, that discomfort should not euphemize views that disregard the lived reality of BIPOC, women, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, fat people and other marginalized groups.

Defining racism was surprisingly diverse among survey respondents: Some said that if “racist” means someone is legitimately a white supremacist, then they would not approve of that professor. But if “racist” means they support President Donald Trump, it is not a problem. Others directly contradicted that by stating any support for Trump is racism. Such distinctions reflect common debates about what constitutes racist remarks and whether it is possible to say something racist without being “racist.” Ultimately, however, when presented with the theoretical question, “Should Harvard hire known racist professors?” shouldn’t there really be one answer that unequivocally condemns racism?

In the survey, this was not the case. Sixteen percent of students replied that Harvard should be able to hire known racist or white supremacist teachers, often citing that cancel culture overuses and misuses these labels. Ten percent of survey respondents replied that they would take a class with a known racist or white supremacist teacher provided they had expertise on the subject they were teaching.

Harvard platforming racist, sexist, or white supremacists professors goes beyond how vocal or biased the individual professor is in practice: It means the institution is actively legitimizing anti-intellectual and hateful views that threaten student safety, or else affirm tolerance of white supremacy among students.

The Resolution of Rights and Responsibilities underscores that the administration must give full and fair hearing to expressions of grievances and respond in good faith to widely-expressed needs for change. This semester is one instance when this path of action was failed. If Harvard is serious about their racial and sexual harassment policies, hiring and firing practices must be reexamined. Systems of oppression should not be reproduced by instructors, but if they are, students should be listened to when they demand change. 

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IT IS 2020, AND PUERTO RICO IS STILL A COLONY

Harold Peón

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arlier this year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a historical bill to advance statehood for Washington, D.C., acknowledging that the capital’s 700,000 residents lack proper representation in Congress. However, the same could be said for over 3 million U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico, who have for decades been in a similar struggle to no avail.

Puerto Rico’s relationship with the U.S. is rooted in a history of discrimination. The island has been a territory of the United States since Spain ceded it in 1898, following America’s inva-

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sion of it during the Spanish-American War. Three years later, the Insular Cases of 1901 made clear that Puerto Ricans were bound to an unequal, colonial relationship grounded in racism in which the island’s residents were seen as inferior: The cases state the island is “inhabited by alien races” that could not understand “Anglo-Saxon principles,” and is, as a territory, “belonging to the United States, but not a part of the United States.”

The Constitution’s territorial clause gives Congress the power to determine which parts of the Constitution apply to territories

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and which do not; accordingly, Puerto Ricans were not granted citizenship until 1917, and only then so that they could serve in World War I. It took until 1947 for the people of the island to be given the right to vote for their own governor. Even today, only about half of American adults know that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.

As a U.S. territory, Puerto Rico has a single non-voting delegate in Congress: its resident commissioner, representing a constituency that would be entitled to five seats and votes if it were located anywhere else in the nation. The island also is over 70 billion dollars in debt, but lacks many of the bankruptcy protections available to states. Scholars, politicians and activists agree that the current political status is unfair and unsustainable, but pro-statehood, pro-commonwealth and pro-independence perspectives constantly clash when looking for solutions.

This November, the island held its third status referendum of the decade, but regardless of its results — which favored statehood — the vote seems inconsequential. True power to amend Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States lies in the hands of the seemingly complacent federal government, where the people of the island have no representation. The nation’s legislators must heed the call of Puerto Ricans and make moving forward with a process of self-determination a priority.

CURRENT STATUS & POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES The question of status shapes Puerto Rican politics. The island’s main political parties are assembled based not on how liberal or conservative their ideologies are, but rather on what association with the U.S. they think is best for the island. The two biggest forces are the pro-statehood Partido Nuevo Progresista, or New Progressive Party, and the pro-commonwealth Partido Popular Democrático, or Popular Democratic Party.

Both encompass diverse perspectives and have ties to the Democratic and Republican Parties, but within each party, its members agree on what relationship would be best for the island to have with the United States. The Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño, or Puerto Rican Independence Party, has also existed since 1946, but fails to garner electoral support of the same scale.

Still, there is a general consensus among all of these parties that the current association is flawed. As Luis Fortuño, a former governor and resident commissioner from the pro-statehood PNP, told the HPR, “To believe that we can continue to live in this limbo forever simply makes no sense and puts us at a disadvantage.”

Fortuño claims that these disadvantages are partly responsible for Puerto Rico’s population decline. The Puerto Rican diaspora has seen the amount of Puerto Ricans living in the 50 states increase to nearly 6 million in 2018, from about 4.5 million in 2010. “The population of Puerto Rico is not only fewer people now, but it’s older,” explained Fortuño. “The younger population tends to leave the island because they see opportunities elsewhere.”

Even some members of the pro-commonwealth PPD acknowledge the need for reform. Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, who has also served as Puerto Rico’s governor and resident commissioner, confirmed this to the HPR: “I don’t think anybody is happy with the current relationship as it is … What we [members of the

PPD] all agree on is that we want a relationship of association with the United States that is not subject to the plenary powers of Congress.”

Those plenary powers give Congress, in which the island has no true representation, power to pass bills that shape the island’s future, like the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act. PROMESA, passed in 2016, established “an Oversight Board to assist the Government of Puerto Rico … in managing its public finances, and for other purposes.” The Board members are appointed by the U.S. president, with the exception of an ex officio member designated by the governor of Puerto Rico, and have sweeping power over the local budget and economy. The Board’s main mission is “to create the necessary foundation for economic growth and to restore opportunity to the people of Puerto Rico,” but since its appointment, the island has seen many austerity measures go into effect under the body’s oversight, including cuts to the pensions of over 65,000 retirees and the closure of 283 public schools.

The imposition of such a board demonstrates that, like in 1901, the U.S. still believes Puerto Rico to be somewhat incapable of governing itself. On June 1, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Board’s appointment after a challenge to PROMESA argued that the appointment of local officers by Congress was unconstitutional. “Congress has ‘full and complete legislative authority over the people of the Territories and all the departments of the territorial governments,’” concurred Justice Clarence Thomas, citing an 1880 decision.

The fact that Puerto Rico is subject to the powers of this federally appointed board, of which no member is elected by people of the island, seems like a near-perfect example of colonialism. Gretchen Sierra-Zorita, an active advocate for Puerto Rican’s rights in Washington, concurs. “I think it’s important to use the word colony … Americans do not see themselves as a colonial empire, because it’s not taught in their schools,” SierraZorita told the HPR. Juan Dalmau, the only pro-independence PIP senator currently in the Puerto Rican Senate, also considers the distinction important, arguing that Puerto Rico is a nation in itself, with its own history, language and way of thought. In an interview with the HPR, Dalmau stated, “Contrary to Rosa Parks, who fought because she wanted to sit in the front of the bus and wanted to have equal rights, we think that Puerto Ricans, as a nation, have to aspire to drive their own bus.” According to Dalmau, the island would forever be subject to the rest of the nation’s wishes with any type of association, even as a state.

In short, politicians across the island have different ideas of what they want Puerto Rico to look like — but none of them desire a future that is similar to the island’s present.

THE 2020 REFERENDUM Recent challenges have underscored the urgency of reevaluating Puerto Rico’s status. After Hurricane Maria struck in 2017, federal aid was slow to arrive and insufficient. A similar situation played out after earthquakes rattled the island in early 2020. It is impossible to know whether these responses would have been any different if Puerto Rico were a state, but there are clear differences from the aid states have received for comparable disasters. These differences exacerbate disparities in health care, education and more.

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Some members of the PNP see these events as a spotlight on the unequal status that Puerto Rico possesses in the nation and, as a result, avidly promote the new referendum as a solution.

However, the referendum has been met with opposition from the PPD and the PIP. When asked about the plebiscite, Eduardo Bhatia, the PPD minority leader in the Puerto Rican Senate, said, “It’s a totally local decision made by the governor [Wanda Vázquez] to cheat and lie to the people.” Bhatia claims the vote is insignificant and meant to reduce the impact of the very problematic term the PNP has had while in control the last four years.

Vázquez’s political problems largely stem from what is often referred to as TelegramGate. After a Telegram text chat in which former Governor Ricardo Roselló and several members of his cabinet used homophobic, sexist and racist language was leaked in the summer of 2019, people took to the streets to demand his resignation. When he and much of his cabinet resigned, the responsibility of governing fell upon then-Secretary of Justice Vázquez. Vázquez said she would only serve until the end of this term but announced her campaign for reelection toward the end of 2019 and was defeated in the primaries earlier in 2020. “Many members of the New Progressive Party had decided to not vote [in 2020], to stay home … They are trying to grasp whatever she can to try to see if she can muster a majority,” Bhatia claimed.

Bhatia’s point could perhaps be substantiated by the unique way this referendum poses the question of the island’s status: It does not ask Puerto Ricans which option they prefer, as the question has mostly been constructed before, but rather asks for a “yes” or “no” response to becoming a state. The “yes” majority vote that was favored will establish a seven-member commission that would develop a transition plan to be presented to Congress. A similar outcome would have resulted from a “no” majority vote, but their plan would not include statehood in the solution.

Even leaders in the PNP acknowledge that this vote will not be the island’s saving grace — but they still believe in the vote itself. “When something is difficult to attain, it is because it is worthwhile,” argued Fortuño. “It is going to be a process, and I believe this November’s vote is part of a process, not the beginning nor the end.” After all, Puerto Rico held referendums on status in 1967, 1993, 1998, 2012 and 2017, but Congress has not been engaged in the process or seemed to care about any of them.

If this was a move by the PNP to get their voters out, it seems to have worked. Their candidate for governor, Pedro Pierluisi, won the election with merely 33% of the popular vote, highlighting how the two traditional Puerto Rican parties, the PNP and PPD, have been steadily losing ground the past few elections. Smaller parties such as the PIP, the left-leaning Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana (Citizen’s Victory Movement), and the right-leaning Proyecto Dignidad (Dignity Project) will all hold seats in the Puerto Rican legislature these next four years.

If no locally designed referendums have led to anything, maybe it is time that Puerto Rico tried something different.

Sadly, however, the island cannot do this alone. Sierra-Zorita believes the vote on status in 2020 will have no consequences, but she also said a potential alternative could be a binding referendum drafted in cooperation with Congress.

However, Puerto Rico’s path to statehood is not straightfor-

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ward, and would certainly face opposition. It is not unusual to see progressive activists calling for outright Puerto Rican statehood, but Sierra-Zorita noted, “Whenever non-Puerto Rican people … talk about, with very good intentions, that we should be a state — it’s like, that’s not up to you to decide, it’s up to Puerto Ricans, and I feel really strongly and am irritated by that kind of talk.” The concept of self-determination is based on giving Puerto Ricans the power to decide their own fate. Imposing statehood would be as coercive as the island’s current status.

THE PATH TO CHANGE When talking about changes to Puerto Rico’s relationship to the U.S., the island is downplayed and constantly portrayed as a burden. Puerto Rico’s $70 billion debt cannot be overlooked.

However, we do not contextualize the debt with the fact that Puerto Rico is subject to the Jones Act, which means Puerto Rico can only receive goods shipped from U.S. ports on American-owned ships, greatly benefiting the nation at the island’s expense. Studies have concluded that without the Jones Act, Puerto Rico could have gained nearly $1.5 billion of economic activity and 13,250 jobs. Similarly, we ignore the fact that the U.S. Navy controlled over 26,000 acres of Puerto Rican land on the island of Vieques from 1941 to 2003, a large part of which they rented out to other armed forces for profits of over $80 million a year. Moreover, most U.S. companies pay virtually no taxes to the Puerto Rican government. The island’s colonial status has hindered economic development and continues to do so.

This presidential election was undeniably consequential for Puerto Rico. President Donald Trump has said statehood for Puerto Rico is an “absolute no,” and Mitch McConell vehemently opposes it as well, but the Republican Platform of 2016 fully supported statehood. President-elect Joe Biden, on the other hand, wrote a column claiming he would favor “a process of self-determination, listening and developing federal legislation that outlines a fair path forward.”

Though statehood for Puerto Rico is unlikely to pass in Mitch McConell’s Senate, Congress should show the same level of concern for the rights of the disenfranchised citizens of Puerto Rico that they do for those in D.C. The United States benefits from having Puerto Rico as a colony, but at the expense of the Puerto Rican people. Senators like Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have introduced bills that could provide debt relief for Puerto Rico; however, it is time for Congress to tackle the root of Puerto Rico’s issue and seek to amend its status through a process of self-determination.

Not only Puerto Ricans living in the states but all Americans should care about their fellow citizens on the island and hold their representatives accountable to help break the vicious cycle in which Puerto Rico has been stuck: waiting for Congress, in which they have no say, to care about its people’s rights and representation. Until that shift, it seems like the island’s plight will go unanswered, and its residents will keep bearing the brunt of colonialism. 

UNITED STATES

Life in Limbo: Pandemic Policy and Immigration Backlogs

Akila Muthukumar

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n April 18, 2017, President Trump signed the Buy American and Hire American executive order with the stated goal of safeguarding American jobs. Since the pandemic, the Trump administration, Department of Homeland Security, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services have been repeatedly using the most harmful versions of xenophobic, “immigrants steal jobs” rhetoric to push their agenda as the election year comes to a close. This deluge of harmful pandemic policies has exacerbated pre-existing structural issues within employment-based visas, creating incredible legal, financial and emotional stress for immigrants and their children.

PANDEMIC POLICY In January 2020, the Trump administration imposed the first ban restricting immigration from countries with high rates

of COVID-19 infection two weeks prior to travel to America.

Then, in March, U.S. consulates abroad closed to prioritize the safety of their officers, leaving many stranded out of the country. In April, the administration issued the first immigrant visa travel ban on the basis of a labor market disruption. This was applied to both family-based visas and employment-based immigrant visas. The ban refused to admit new green card applicants, citing that they could take job opportunities from Americans. However, since consulates were closed, no one was obtaining visas from a practical or logistical standpoint — pushing immigration bans under the guise of creating new jobs is merely a political strategy.

This ban was issued for 30 days and then renewed in June, alongside a new proclamation suspending additional immigrants behind the smokescreen of the pandemic. Although they cited high unemployment rates caused by the pandemic, the technical fields in which the majority of H-1B visa holders work

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saw unemployment rates dropping during the pandemic due to the shift to remote work. They never provided specific evidence regarding how the banned visa classifications affected employment opportunities for U.S. workers.

“You really could not get a visa to come here unless you had some emergency since March,” Eileen Lohmann, senior associate at Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP, explained to the HPR. She elaborated that “it was totally understandable at the time” for U.S. consulates to close due to the pandemic, and no one questioned that decision. “But right now, seven months later, we’re still in a situation where it’s very hard to get a visa appointment unless you have an emergency.”

To conclude an election year with unprecedented levels of immigration policy, in mid-October, both the Department of Labor and DHS issued rules changing the wage requirements for H-1B and E-3 temporary visa categories and permanent labor certifications, and core H-1B eligibility requirements. The alleged goal was once again to ensure there is no adverse effect on the wages and job opportunities of U.S. workers. In reality, employer costs to sponsor foreign workers increased, destabilizing many H-1B workers’ lives and ability to stay in the country — without any measurable improvements in the lives of U.S. workers.

Given that the travel bans and new regulations restrict highskilled immigration, we see the Trump administration “taking advantage of [the current] situation to accomplish goals that [it] has had for years, but has not been able to follow through on until now,” according to Lohmann. “[The October regulations] had been on the agenda for over three years. Normally, you’re required to propose a regulation, allow the public to comment on it, review the comments, publish a final rule, and then it usually goes into effect 30 or 60 days after. They put the new wage rule into effect immediately, which is very unusual.”

The administration relied on an exception to that rule by issuing interim final regulations with the same insufficient logic: We are in a period of high unemployment, and we need to protect U.S. workers by restricting foreign workers. Although some companies abusing the H-1B system to outsource work has led to Americans losing jobs, previous commentary argues that the smarter policy solution is not slashing H-1B workers, but reducing incentives for offshore jobs. According to one nonpartisan research study, removal of the H-1B program will not create more jobs for Americans: It will create more offshore jobs. H-1B workers contribute to the economy, both in terms of their work and their taxes.

Both the business and immigration community have responded with lawsuits, challenging both the substance and procedural defects in the government’s process of implementing these rules this October. In fact, when companies brought a lawsuit against the June H-1B ban, a California judge issued an injunction preventing the government from applying the ban against the organizations that brought the lawsuit — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, TechNet, and Intrax.

“Even though it’s not a nationwide injunction [and] it doesn’t apply to everyone, it still applies to a lot of people. That was a good victory,” she said. However, these bans are in effect until December 31, and can be extended by the president. “A lot of it depends on who’s president in January.”

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CITIZENSHIP COMPLEXITY When it comes to employment-based visas, exactly 140,000 individuals are given the chance to apply for lawful permanent residency — colloquially known as a green card — every fiscal year. Once granted this permanent residency, they can apply for U.S. citizenship. There are numerical and percent-based caps for five subcategories within this 140,000 limit: top priority workers such as multinational managers or exceptional researchers, professionals with advanced degrees beyond bachelor’s degree or exceptional talent, those with college degrees, two years of professional experience, or non-seasonal labor work, special immigrants such as religious workers and translators, and people who will invest $500,000 to $1 million in a business that can employ at least 10 full-time U.S. workers.

Once the individual’s employer has filed papers for them and the USCIS has approved them, they are directed to the National Visa Council to earn a visa number, with additional steps required to sponsor family members. This process alone can take years and requires significant spending — whether making photocopies of documents, hiring immigration lawyers to file complex paperwork, or getting medical examinations done. Finally, individuals will enter their country and category’s queue.

Once their date arrives, immigrants will continue processing additional documents and travel to the U.S. embassy or consulate for visa interviews.

Each country is limited to 7% of the worldwide level of U.S. immigrant admissions, placing a ceiling on immigration. Extensive backlogs for individuals in countries like India, China, Mexico, and the Philippines, which have high levels of immigration, means there are wait times up to 150 years. In fact, the October 2020 Visa Bulletin — which shows which green card applicants are eligible to move forward — currently lists visa applicants from as early as 1996 for family-based visas and 2009 for employment-based visas.

LIFE IN LIMBO Eager to bring light to these injustices, Action for Backlogged Immigrant Children is a national student-run organization raising awareness about green card backlogs. They focus on H-4 students, those who are dependents of parents on H-1B visas.

“At first we were trying to sprint a marathon. We tried to lobby politicians as 16- to 18-year-olds,” said Srija Vem, one of the co-founders of ABIC. “Now we’ve kind of switched our focus to just raising awareness because that’s what we can do best. We have to help out our parents, as the people who benefit from all this paperwork and all the burdens.”

Apart from the extraordinarily limited and specific categories of application, the onerous path to citizenship leaves the individual at the mercy of their employer. Employers have to ascertain that “there are no U.S. workers available, willing, and qualified to fill the position” for a similar wage at that geographic location by filing documents with the Department of Labor. Then, the employer can petition the USCIS. As Sid Suresh, the other co-founder of ABIC, explained: “The H-1B system is so favored toward the company, and the company has a lot of power over the workers. It’s not worth it.”

During the pandemic, increased layoffs and being stuck out of

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the country have increased the likelihood that jobs — and subsequently citizenship — will be threatened for these workers. Switching jobs is nearly impossible, as employers must finance the application process, and definitively disadvantageous, since it restarts the application process.

With decades-long wait times, H-1B workers must continue lotterying for their right to remain in the country every three years. With layoffs and consulate closures during the pandemic, H-1B individuals stuck in another country are unlikely to renew their work visa and their family — often H-4 dependents — risks deportation from America, sometimes to a country they know nothing about.

These students express particular frustration at their inability to vote, inability to work — as they cannot legally file taxes — as well as their exclusion from colleges, various academic and internship programs, and job opportunities. Only five American colleges are need-blind for international students and most scholarship programs have citizenship-based requirements.

This often limits the traditional high school or college experience and disadvantages students for competitive positions in the future.

Even after surmounting these barriers to entry, students feel pressured to work toward a career that is most conducive toward earning their citizenship — a right they desperately seek. In the words of Divyeshz Sivakumar, another member of ABIC, “I’m not sure if I choose a [particular] major, will I [find an employer willing to sponsor] an H-1B or even stay in the U.S. if I age out. I would pursue STEM because that’s the pathway that I’m most likely to get an H-1B.” But these are not the only difficult choices these students face. The group explains their own tenuous path toward citizenship: how they must choose between remaining an H-4 dependent to become naturalized alongside their H-1B parents once their priority date arrives, or transferring to an F-1 and restarting the same process their parents began decades ago.

Once they turn 21, students are required to switch to an F-1, creating a time constraint. Debating the complex benefits of each is

an unclear process: F-1 applications require significant financial investments and a trip to one’s home country, which can be riddled with unexpected delays.

“There’s also the issue of not enough information being out there,” said Nehal Ambalkar, another member of ABIC. “I haven’t met very many H-4 to F-1 switches. When you’re an H-4, you’re just going through it on your own. It causes you to base your entire life plan around: What if I age out? What if I need to get an H-1B? You’re never living in the present.”

For others running these risks and restarting the trek to citizenship is unfathomable — they do not want to repeat their parents’ stories. Knowing the American dream was nonexistent for their parents, it’s difficult not to feel disillusioned themselves.

“I would really consider going to Europe or some other country because I don’t want to deal with being on a visa,” said Sid. “I think it’s terrible. It’s a [big] sacrifice to make. That’s the only reason our parents went through it, [thinking]: ‘Maybe if I work 10 years, my children can have a better opportunity.’”

Many European countries grant citizenship after a set period of residency as opposed to the country-specific and type of workspecific caps in America.

Ultimately, the group feels it can only take indirect action to affect factors outside of their control. They encourage their peers to vote, and encourage Congressional representatives to push for legislation that makes it easier for H-4 visas to obtain work authorizations. Beyond the legislative push forward, the group serves as a support system to get through the emotional tolls of “doing everything right” only to be denied a voice and left with a fragmented identity.

“Everyone should have an equal opportunity to voice their opinions, because that’s something we can do right now. We’re paying so much in taxes. But we don’t have a vote here. Nor do we have one in [our home country],” Vem said. “We don’t have any voice globally. And that’s been something really hard to deal with.” 

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We Must Protect Our Environmental Protections

Madison Goldberg In December of 2008, Tennessee’s Emory River turned black. It was clogged with an estimated 300 million gallons of sludge after a dam failed at the nearby Kingston Fossil Plant and sent a slurry of coal ash and water surging into the river valley.

Coal ash, a byproduct churned out by coal-fired power plants, is toxic; as Kingston’s sludge destroyed homes on the banks of the river, it also carried heavy metals like mercury and lead into the waterways. Many of the workers hired to clean up the spill are still suffering from serious illness over a decade later.

In the aftermath of the disaster, the Environmental Protection Agency began inspecting coal ash storage facilities across

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the country. In 2015, citing their findings, the agency created a policy that regulated storage of the toxic waste product — an incremental move, but an indication that the Obama-era EPA took the lessons of the Kingston spill seriously. Now, the Trump administration is chipping away at the policy, introducing and widening loopholes even after the D.C. Circuit ruled that the original regulations had not been stringent enough. And the creeks and streams of coal country, once protected from this kind of contamination, are heavier with toxic ash because of it.

The Trump administration is dismantling the coal ash rule sentence by sentence. Through a series of ostensibly unremark-

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able changes — an added exception here, an extended deadline there — the Trump EPA has poked enough holes in that environmental regulation to put this country’s water resources at risk. And the crumbling of the coal ash rule reflects a larger pattern: Among the scores of environmental regulations that the Trump administration has attempted — often successfully — to roll back, many seem esoteric or mundane. Changes to the rules are so embedded in regulatory jargon or misleading language that their implications risk going unnoticed. Moreover, the Trump EPA has pursued these rollbacks in the shadow of other extraordinary attacks on the environment and climate: withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord and replacing the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, to name a couple. Those decisions are egregious, and they demand our attention. But if we want a stable future for Earth and its inhabitants — in fact, if we do not want to reverse environmental progress by decades — we cannot afford to ignore the Trump EPA’s subtler moves. After all, steady erosion can cause a landslide.

That is not to say every environmental advocate needs to keep track of every deregulatory move; that is a dizzying prospect. (The rule changes are so constant and wide-ranging that Harvard Law School’s Environmental & Energy Law Program created a tracker just for other environmental rollback trackers.) Some specific rollbacks, however, demonstrate the hefty consequences that the Trump EPA’s strategic rule-tweaking can have.

Take, for instance, the agency’s recent deregulation of hydrofluorocarbons. In the ’90s, the EPA approved HFCs as a replacement for ozone-depleting chemicals, part of a landmark international commitment to protecting the dwindling ozone layer. When research began to show that HFCs are greenhouse gases thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide, many countries ratified the Kigali Amendment, pledging to phase out HFCs as well; in 2016, the EPA established national regulations on HFCs, pending U.S. ratification. Not only has the Trump administration failed to send the Kigali Amendment to the Senate, but the EPA has rolled back the 2016 regulations on HFCs. Their changes might seem small; on industry recommendation, they tossed requirements for the inspection and repair of HFC leaks, for instance. But the EPA itself has predicted that the rollbacks could add about 3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions to the U.S. output annually, an amount roughly equal to the greenhouse emissions of almost 650,000 cars in one year.

Even more galling, the Trump EPA titled that new rule “Protecting Stratospheric Ozone.” To be clear, this rule is exactly as stringent toward ozone-depleting substances as the previous regulations were; it merely loosens restrictions on an alternative that has since lost scientific and international favor.

In other words, far from protecting the ozone layer at all, it caters to industry and places the United States in opposition to the growing international embrace of chemical alternatives that neither destroy the ozone layer nor contribute heavily to the greenhouse effect.

In fact, deceptive language abounds in the agency’s recent rollbacks: one recently proposed rule, titled “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science,” would prohibit EPA regulators from relying on any scientific data that cannot be made publicly available. This might be a laudable goal — except that health data is often confidential, meaning that the EPA would

lack much of the research behind its regulation of industrial polluters. The proposal has generated widespread criticism from the scientific community; in a recent letter, a coalition of the country’s universities and leading scientific organizations condemned the rule, writing that it is “not about strengthening science, but about undermining the ability of the EPA to use the best available science in setting policies and regulations.”

Protecting the ozone layer and increasing scientific accessibility should absolutely be environmental priorities, but the Trump EPA is using them as smokescreens for distinctly anti-environmental policies.

To set off the avalanche of deregulation, the Trump administration has eagerly given control of the EPA to some of the agency’s most vocal detractors. It is important to clarify that the Trump EPA continues to employ a number of career staff members who have committed themselves to environmental protection; deep budget cuts and disapproval of the agency’s new deregulatory bent, however, have compelled many of them to leave. And much of the new leadership chosen by the Trump administration comes to the EPA directly from the chemical and fossil fuel industries that the agency is charged with regulating. Most visibly, agency head Andrew Wheeler previously worked as a coal lobbyist. But the conflicts of interest are everywhere; for instance, the head of the EPA’s Superfund program — established to hold polluting corporations responsible for their own cleanup — had previously fought for Dow Chemical in the company’s Superfund disputes. With that kind of leadership, it is hardly surprising that environmental protections are disintegrating.

All of these changes — the regulatory tweaks, the disavowal of science, the political appointees — have very real human consequences. And the majority of the burden is borne, far and away, by low-income communities and communities of color.

The Obama administration, for instance, tried to ban a pesticide called chlorpyrifos; last year, the Trump EPA announced it would not pursue a ban, and scores of farmworkers have suffered bouts of acute poisoning as a result. The agency has proposed scientifically dubious allowances for toxic air pollutants, when research has shown that neighborhoods with more low-income residents or residents of color face disproportionately high concentrations of precisely those pollutants. The Trump EPA’s environmental transgressions threaten global consequences, but these communities will be affected first and most intensely.

What in the (increasingly polluted) world can we do? While regulatory changes do have public comment periods during which advocates can register their disapproval, litigation appears to be the most effective weapon. Environmental advocacy groups and coalitions of state attorneys general have tirelessly challenged the Trump EPA’s rollbacks — often to great effect.

Aggressive litigation will help blunt the administration’s attack on the planet until a new president can replace the EPA’s leadership and set the agency back on course. Litigators are particularly situated to target the Trump EPA’s regulatory sleight-ofhand, but legal recourse is not available to everyone; in large part, it will be up to states and environmental organizations to safeguard these long-sought protections. Those efforts, combined with the attention of the public, could preserve the country’s regulatory foundation until the Environmental Protection Agency can get back to doing the job it was named for. 

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Water is China’s Greatest Weapon and its Achilles Heel

by Jack Silvers

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hen it comes to flood myths, China’s is not as well known as Noah’s Ark, but just as influential. Legend says that four millennia ago, the Yellow and Yangtze rivers frequently flooded, with devastating consequences for the ancient Chinese. However, salvation arrived when a distant relative of the emperor, Yu, united the region’s disparate tribes, constructed a revolutionary irrigation system, and conquered the floodwaters. Yu then ascended to the role of emperor himself on the strength of his water taming prowess.

Now, as China continues its Yu-like ascent to global power, it is once again dealing with issues of the liquid variety. This year, central and southern China have been ravaged by flooding that has displaced millions and caused at least $26 billion in damage. At the same time, the Chinese government has long battled against water scarcity: nearly 1 out of 5 people in the world live in China, yet only 6% of the Earth’s freshwater lies within the country’s borders. China is far from alone in its predicament;

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the UN estimates that water scarcity affects 40% of the global population. Dr. Marlos de Souza, the coordinator of the UNWater Expert Group on Water Scarcity, told the HPR that water scarcity is being driven by more than simply drought, but by a complex array of environmental and economic factors.

Yet even in a warming and drying world, China might have the upper hand: It sits on the source of 10 major rivers, which aggregately flow through 11 countries and supply 1.6 billion people with water. China controls Tibet and the Tibetan Plateau, otherwise known as the world’s “Third Pole” because its glaciers give birth to the lion’s share of Asia’s rivers. Therefore, China’s upstream actions — for instance, its dam-building — have scores of impacts for downstream countries. Dechen Palmo, a research fellow at the Tibet Policy Institute, was not exaggerating when he wrote in The Diplomat that “the future of Asia’s water lies in China’s hands.”

Palmo’s warning and recent flooding shed light on China’s

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enigmatic relationship with water. Xi Jinping’s superpower could likely cut off much of Southeast Asia’s access to water if it desired, but could also succumb to its own water woes. How China manages its liquid gold will not only affect its own fate but the fate of hundreds of millions of thirsty citizens across the continent.

CHINA CONTROLS THE FLOOD Countries have fought over water for centuries. But today, strains on the global water supply portend an increased likelihood of “water wars” which would be much more deadly than the battles of old. A report from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre pointed to several hotspots where “hydropolitical” tensions could spark a military encounter. These include the Ganges-Brahmaputra, one of the five most vulnerable transboundary water spots.

The Brahmaputra begins in southern China and drains into India and Bangladesh, supplying water for millions of citizens along its 2,000-mile path. India relies on the river to nourish residents of growing megacities, while Bangladesh is almost entirely dependent on the Brahmaputra and other transboundary rivers for its overall water supply. Still, China, as the upper country, has plunged ahead with hydropower ventures that have forced its downstream neighbors to adapt.

China’s first foray into damming the Brahmaputra came in 2010, when it began constructing a dam in Zangmu, Tibet. In 2013, the Chinese government announced plans to build three more mid-size dams on the river. Because India and China have no shared water treaty, then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could only press China to make its dams “run-of-theriver” projects that would only store water for power generation.

With the Zangmu plant operational since 2015 and construction on the next three dams ongoing, Chinese reassurances seem to have mollified Indian officials for now. But another Asian river, the Mekong, illustrates the danger of giving Chinese hydro engineers the benefit of the doubt.

The Mekong starts high up in the Tibetan plateau and ends at the South China Sea, feeding into the huge Tonle Sap lake on the way. In an interview with the HPR, Brian Eyler, a Mekong expert at the Stimson Center, described the unique nature of the Tonle Sap, which swells during the wet season to five times its normal area then contracts during the dry season. “It kind of works like a heartbeat that pushes the blood of the Mekong through the system,” said Eyler. The river and its lake support the food supply of Cambodia and Vietnam, the fishing industry of Thailand, and the hydropower trade of Laos. These vital economic activities depend on a steady and predictable upstream flow, which in recent years has no longer been a guarantee.

The Mekong, or Lancang in China, has been the site of dam construction in China’s Yunnan province since the 1990s. In the past decade, however, China has accelerated dam development. The Xiaowan dam, completed in 2011, features a retaining wall almost as high as the Eiffel Tower; alongside the similarly massive Nuozhadu dam, the two could submerge all of London beneath 24 metres of water. Xiaowan and Nuozhadu are two of 11 Chinese dams on the upper Mekong, a recipe for disaster in the eyes of many. This disaster has frequently come in the form of drought, and new research suggests that Chinese hydropower plays a pivotal role.

Upstream dam construction presents an array of concerns for downstream countries, most notably decreased flows of water downstream. Along the Mekong, this concern was validated by a study released in April by Eyes on Earth, a water monitoring outfit. The study used satellite data to predict the natural, unimpeded flow of the river, then compared this model to actual river height data from a gauge in Thailand. After 2012, when the Xiaowan dam was completed, the authors documented a divergence between the predicted flow of the river and gauge data. In 2019, the divergence was magnified: Although the river model predicted above-average flows during the annual wet season, the Lower Mekong experienced some of its lowest-ever river levels.

Alan Basist, an author of the paper, told the HPR that “The natural rhythm of the river was not any different in 2019 than in the other years. Yet the water received downstream was a small percentage of what it should have been.”

The effects of the 2019 drought in Lower Mekong countries were devastating, and they offer a stark warning of how Chinese dams can exacerbate droughts. Fishing communities along the Tonle Sap in Cambodia reported catches 80% down from the previous years. This loss represents more than an economic blow: Cambodians rely on fish to produce prahok, a staple protein that anchors the Cambodian diet. In other areas, such as Vietnamese cities along the Mekong Delta, the holding back of water in Chinese reservoirs equated to the complete loss of freshwater access. As Eyler put it, “The entire heartbeat process of the river is just weakened and undermined by what man is doing to the river system by building dams.” Ironically, the same engineers responsible for this disruption have been toiling away for decades to provide clean water for their own country.

THERE’S SOMETHING IN THE WATER Nourishing China’s 1.4 billion citizens is no easy feat, but the government has made major strides since the turn of the century. Between 2000 and 2019, the number of Chinese who relied on untreated sources for drinking water dropped by 150 million.

This drop can largely be attributed to the herculean poverty reduction efforts undertaken by Chinese brass. However, China’s rapid industrialization and urbanization have eased the problem of water scarcity while exacerbating water pollution.

The gravity of this issue was not lost on Xi Jinping in 2013 when he remarked that “the standard that internet users apply for lake water quality is whether the mayor dares to jump in and swim.” Shortly before Xi’s comments, the residents of Shanghai had just finished fishing 16,000 dead pigs out of the nearby Huangpu River. An estimated 70% of China’s rivers and lakes are polluted, helping to explain why more than a quarter of China’s surface water is unfit for human consumption. Persistent pollution of this type does not only reduce the amount of available drinking water, but can also have serious health consequences.

Luckily, Xi’s jokes gave way to concrete action to clean up China’s muddy waterways. In 2015, his government launched the Water Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan, which sets water quality targets to be met by 2030. This plan opened the floodgates for a flurry of government spending on clean-up projects, including $100.2 billion of investment in nearly 8,000 projects in just the first half of 2017 alone. In an interview with the HPR, Dr. Junjie Zhang, an environmental economist at Duke Kunshan University in China, added that “Since 2013, China has

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had very tight control over the water pollution problem, and many of the pollutants have peaked.” While some types of pollution remain stagnant, the government can at least claim that water pollution is a priority.

Water scarcity promises to be less easily remedied. This issue is one that exploits China’s regional disparities in resources: Half of the country’s population lives in 15 northern provinces which contain only 20% of the country’s freshwater resources. Eight of the nine provinces that suffer from absolute water scarcity are in the north, leading the government to attempt a massive diversion of water from the south to the north. Officially dubbed the South-to-North Water Diversion project, the phalanx of canals and pipelines represents the largest and most expensive Chinese infrastructure project since 1949. The project’s apparent success in delivering water to Beijing has been celebrated by Chinese leadership.

In reality, the diversion project has deepened a schism between those who favor active water distribution efforts and those arguing for furthering water conservation. While some hydro-specialists support the diversion project, others question the utility of the project. A 2015 commentary in the journal Nature explored a number of ways that northern China could meet its water needs without leeching off the south, from wastewater recycling to improvements in irrigation infrastructure. Such an approach might avert the considerable environmental and social impacts of the central government’s projects, helping people like Zhao Keqian, who was forced to abandon his home due to the diversion scheme. Zhao captured the disillusionment of southern province residents when he told The Economist that “The government doesn’t care about us.”

To deliver equitable water access across the country, China may need to think locally. Zhang told the HPR that a shift has begun: “Water recycling in urban areas has been discussed in China for more than two decades. Now, it is growing.” Still, climate change will decrease the available water supply even further while increasing the frequency of extreme weather events.

Meanwhile, as cities continue to grow in population, regional disparities will continue to grow. These factors may compel the government to seek international input on its water problems.

Passing Around the Cup The existing mechanisms for international dialogue are headlined by UN-Water, a collaboration platform uniting UN agencies and governmental partners. Its biggest achievement to date on water cooperation is the UN Watercourses Convention, which entered into force in 2014 and codifies principles of equitable water utilization, transboundary cooperation, and pollution prevention. De Souza equated the convention’s modus operandi with that of the UN as a whole, saying “It’s based on collaboration, and litigation is the last resort to be used.” Collaboration, however, fails when countries don’t show up to the table. As of now, China has not joined the convention, representing a key blow to the UN’s efforts.

China has taken more of an active stance in regional water dialogues, however. The Mekong River Commission facilitates regional diplomacy between Mekong countries. China is a dialogue member and shares its river data with the MRC only during the wet season. Dr. Anoulak Kittikhoun, Chief Strategy and Partnership Officer of the MRC, told the HPR that “The

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flood season data are good enough for our flood forecasting, but not good enough for basin management and planning.” Recently, China pledged to expand its data sharing with the MRC and build a new information-sharing platform under the auspices of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation, another regional association of riparian countries with an entirely Chinese leadership structure. On data sharing and other issues, the LMC gives China the opportunity to dominate the discussion.

Expecting a radical change in Chinese actions towards the Mekong or other shared rivers ignores the country’s history. The trauma of past flooding informs China’s attempts to out-engineer nature, while its longtime struggle with water scarcity leads its leader to view water as a sovereign resource rather than a shared one. Perhaps, Xi’s leadership cadre will choose to engage with international dialogue on water issues — a prospect that many countries, including the U.S., would be wise to welcome.

Until then, it’s up to Xi to either embrace Emperor Yu’s legacy of cooperation or continue to independently struggle against a tidal wave of challenges. 

The Fault in Our Stars: Modern Threats to International Space Law

Chinyere Obasi

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he year is 2420. It is now not only achievable, but also cost-effective to leave the pale blue dot that is Earth. But rather than enter a solar system of wonder and exploration, instead, you are met with an American military base covering the surface of the Moon. China has chosen Mars as its personal property. India has claimed Jupiter, Japan, its moons, while Russia has expanded to include Venus.

At first glance, this may seem far-fetched and even fantastical, but the roots of this hypothetical exist in our world as we

speak. On September 19 of 2020, the Director-General of the Russian space association Roscosmos stated in a conference with reporters in Moscow that Venus is a “Russian Planet.” This rhetoric regarding outer space and celestial bodies as something to be controlled or influenced by national interests is not unique to the Kremlin. We see it in the United States as well, where President Trump has openly espoused his belief that outer space “is the world’s newest warfighting domain” and that “American superiority in space is absolutely vital.” These statements are ex

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amples of a general degradation of rhetoric around outer space that has existed since the end of the Cold War. This degradation presents a problem not only for citizens now but also in the future. There are significant ramifications for both international space law and for territories beyond that field.

This deterioration has to stop now. The basis of international space law—the idea that outer space is for peace and belongs to all of us—must be maintained.

How Did We Get Here?

In 1967, at the height of the Cold War, dignitaries from around the world convened in Moscow, London, and New York City to sign the “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies.” More commonly known as the “Outer Space Treaty,” this document forms the basis for international law regarding outer space and, as of 2020, 110 recognized states are party to it, including nations representing every space agency in the “Big Six” (the United States of America, the Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China, members of the European Space Agency, India, and Japan).

In 17 articles, the Outer Space Treaty lays out the idea that we should only use the cosmos for peaceful purposes. Key points of the treaty include Article IV, which both reaffirms a previous UN resolution that bans placing weapons of mass destruction into orbit or on celestial bodies and expands it by stating that nations should only use outer space for peaceful action, and Article II, which declares in no uncertain terms that outer space is not subject to national claims. These principles have formed the basis for how the world acts in outer space for the past halfcentury.

Outer space is also usually considered to be covered under the concept of the “common heritage of mankind.” The idea essentially follows the same principles of the Outer Space Treaty: these areas are for all humanity to use, should be preserved for future generations, and are not subject to national control.

The Gravity of the Issue It is not very difficult to see where the Kremlin and the White House’s comments conflict with the Outer Space Treaty’s text and spirit. The Roscosmos Director-General’s statement regarding Russian sovereignty over Venus contradicts Article II of the treaty—that no celestial body should be subjected to national appropriation. While not in direct opposition to the text of the treaty, President Trump’s remarks represent a shift in rhetoric and policy away from the ideas on which the Outer Space Treaty is built and towards an attitude that sees space as nationalistic, militaristic, and not inherently peaceful.

This presents a problem. With the United States’ propensity to leave or threaten to leave international agreements, it is not inconceivable to imagine a situation in which our reality reflects this rhetoric. The Outer Space Treaty may be figuratively ripped up and replaced with a militaristic and nationalistic attitude toward the cosmos, which could threaten scientific progress and transnational transfers of knowledge in favor of a “this is ours, back off” mentality. The basis of modern space research is a dialogue between nations. Yes, nationalist interests do play a role to some extent. Still, there remains a belief that the continued

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progression into the last frontier requires all significant parties to work together to understand that frontier, as the resulting understanding benefits everyone. A world in which the Outer Space Treaty is no longer heeded and national interest is held as supreme could undo much of the progress we have made in the past couple of decades and hinder current development involving space research.

The ramifications of this future would also affect us on Earth.

A nationalistic approach to space would be detrimental to space programs that are not already fully advanced, and a world in which military might can be exercised in orbit, especially with regards to weapons of mass destruction, puts everyone at risk, regardless of nationality. Moreover, it would further the very divide between nations that so much of international law is dedicated to minimizing. A new view of outer space as a military entity could signal a return to the kind of unease and uncertainty that surrounded much of the culture around outer space during the Cold War era. One might be reminded of the Sputnik launch in 1957, which caused widespread fear and anxiety within the United States and across the western world. Even after the Soviet Union’s insistence on the satellite’s purpose as a research unit, the combination of outer space’s unknown factor and the militaristic actions between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. generated a sense of incredible unease for a significant portion of the American population, and we are at risk of developing these same conditions soon if this trend of rhetoric continues.

Such degradation also presents significant problems for other territories. The legal principle that protects outer space—the common heritage of mankind—is not unique to the void above.

This legal concept also includes other extra-national territories, namely international airspace, international waters, and, to some extent, Antarctica. Thus, a collective international decision to effectively ignore the idea of common heritage may eliminate the protections around these areas. Of particular interest are the Arctic and Antarctic regions, where much of the effects of climate change are most acutely observed. Antarctica is often considered part of the common heritage, as is the seabed underneath the Arctic ice. Thus, if this principle of common heritage is ignored, the impetus to protect and aid these regions, as well as other places affected by climate change, may be reduced. In a time where environmental protection and advocacy is more important than ever, the last thing we need is a world in which we only protect our own sovereign land and leave everything else to metaphorically go to hell.

As a collective human race, we must end the practice of using rhetoric that forwards nationalistic and militaristic attitudes towards outer space. This must stop now, lest we turn words into thoughts, thoughts into actions, and actions into danger. The stakes are too high to let this go.

Peace is there. Let us keep it that way. 

WORLD

W

Biden, the Middle East, and the Restoration of the “Blob” by Johannes Lang

hen Joe Biden delivered his victory speech to thousands of jubilant supporters gathered in Wilmington, Delaware, one topic was conspicuously absent: foreign policy. Faced with a raging pandemic and an economy in disarray, the president-elect’s policy priorities will be decidedly domestic. Today, America is no longer willing or able to play the policeman in the Middle East. But if history is any guide, as president, Joe Biden may have a hard time staying out of the crises plaguing the region. Biden’s inauguration will see the restoration of what Barack Obama’s national security advisor Ben Rhodes famously termed “the blob” — a bipartisan foreign policy elite that believes in U.S. engagement and is hesitant to jeopardize increasingly controversial alliances with Israel or Saudi Arabia.

Joe Biden is no newcomer to foreign policy. As a senator, he twice chaired the Foreign Relations Committee; as vice president, he took on an outsized role in the design and execution of U.S. foreign policy. On substance, however, Biden is harder to pin down. “I don’t think you can generalize and say that he is in this camp or in that camp,” Guy Ziv, an assistant professor at the American University in Washington, D.C., told the HPR. Over his long career, Biden has made his fair share of blunders, leading former Defense Secretary Robert Gates to famously declare that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

In his years as vice president, Joe Biden was a persistent voice of caution and restraint. Decades of experience have hardened Biden’s realism about the limits of U.S. power and led him to embrace a narrow definition of the American national interest. Biden opposed Obama’s Afghanistan troop surge in 2009, dissented on the U.S. decision to intervene in Libya, and even warned against the ultimately successful raid that would lead to the death of Osama bin Laden. The incoming administration will likely continue to reduce America’s military footprint in the Middle East. As Biden wrote earlier this year, “It is past time to end the forever wars.”

But the president-elect is not an isolationist. The list of people reportedly under consideration for Biden’s Middle East team is full of experienced diplomats and Obama administration alumni largely supportive of the idea of American leadership.

“Whether we like it or not, the world simply does not organize itself,” Antony Blinken, Biden’s pick for secretary of state, recently told The New York Times. Blinken, a Washington insider with impeccable credentials, is a committed internationalist with a penchant for interventionism. Joe Biden will be careful to avoid the strategic overreach that has come to haunt past U.S. presidents. But the incoming president will be equally averse to a fundamental change in the way America conducts itself in the Middle East. As Paul Salem, president of the Middle East Institute, put it to the HPR, “There won’t be any surprises in a Biden administration.”

Like most in Washington, Joe Biden believes that America’s regional strategic priority should be to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities. Two years ago, Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal established under President Obama. Trump sought to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program through a strategy of “maximum pressure.” Yet according to

Rami Khouri, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, Trump’s approach has only backfired: “The sanctions, the pressures, and the threats just don’t work,” Khouri told the HPR. Biden, who distinguishes himself from the sitting president through his commitment to multilateralism and diplomacy, has promised to re-enter the international agreement with Iran and “do whatever necessary to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.” It remains an open question whether the Iranians will play along. As the country awaits its own presidential election in June, Iran’s current leadership may lack the authority for renewed negotiations with the Americans.

Rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran will also be a cause of concern for Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu. Unlike Trump, the president-elect supports a two-state solution, clearly opposes Israeli annexation of the West Bank, and wants to re-establish contacts with the Palestinians. At the same time, Biden has been unequivocal in his support for Israel. “Like most people in the Washington establishment, he is much closer to Israel than he is to an even-handed Palestinian-Israeli position,” thinks Khouri. Biden is unlikely to “waste his time” on IsraeliPalestinian negotiations “because the chances of success are extremely low,” said Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, in an interview with the HPR. As Salem put it, “He will change the language and change the tone, but he can’t very much change the reality.”

In general, Biden’s team is unlikely to substantially rethink America’s traditional alliances in the region. On the campaign trail, Biden took a jab at Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and promised to make the Saudi monarchs “the pariah that they are.” Throughout the protests of the Arab Spring, Vice President Biden was hesitant to publicly support calls for the expulsion of American-aligned autocrats. “He is perfectly willing to live with autocrats and authoritarian governments around the region,” Khouri argued. While Biden is unlikely to risk the strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia, “he’ll try to tone down some of their excesses for their own good and for his own good.” In particular, the incoming administration will likely try to end the disastrous Saudi war on Yemen, which is facing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Joe Biden, a Washington insider if there ever was one, campaigned on a return to normalcy, a promise that soundly resonated with many around the country and the world. The president-elect will formulate foreign policy not on impulse or by tweet, but with the help of an experienced team of experts and diplomats. A strategic realist, Joe Biden will think twice before embarking on another costly adventure in the Middle East.

At the same time, the incoming administration’s approach will come as a sore disappointment to those hoping for a fundamental transformation of American Middle East policy. For better or worse, the “blob” will be back in charge in the White House. 

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by Johneth Price

T

he protests which shook the world this summer have left U.S. cities and their systems rattled by the shouts and demands of justice for Black Americans. From Minneapolis to Chicago, Los Angeles to Louisville, and countless other major cities, we have seen mainstream news and social media coverage of individuals demanding police reform. These calls for reform have included passing Breonna’s Law to ban no-knock warrants, seeking justice for Black Americans wrongfully murdered, and the goal of a fundamental restructuring of an oppressive society.

News channels cover events as they unfold in large cities but that does not represent the whole country. What is happening outside city perimeters? What is happening in communities where the population is closer to 100 than 100,000?

YEARS OF INJUSTICE Grand Junction is a predominantly White community in rural Colorado with Black Americans making up less than 1% of the population. In my town where prominent historical figures, like Walter Walker who founded the town newspaper, have ties to the Klu Klux Klan, implementing inclusive policies and listening to minority communities are actions often left to the back burner.

Last year, after months of prodding by a family whose children were called racial slurs and received threatening letters,

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Grand Junction adopted an inclusivity proclamation. This proclamation pledged that the city of Grand Junction would work to ensure human rights for all and celebrate “people of all races, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, genders, economic status, and physical and mental circumstances.” Throughout the 18 years I have lived in Grand Junction, I have rarely witnessed racial justice or inequality as a common discussion topic. Community members work to avoid uncomfortable conversations regarding the prevalent bias and racism ingrained in our community. This is a common reality in small towns.

In the past, no matter what social justice movement was at the forefront of media coverage, the dynamics of my hometown were never represented — perhaps that’s why the support shown on TV for the issue never seemed to translate to my community.

Recently, these same large disparities have been prevalent in the representation of how different American communities are working to bring about racial justice and combat racism. Nationally, there are protests with tens of thousands of individuals facing tear gas and pepper spray from the police, whilst in recent years, the few protests I have seen in my town have faced low turnout. Because of how prevalent and ingrained implicit racial biases are in my community, even protests with larger turnouts have found it difficult to translate momentary awareness into direct action. When looking to see how to support the BLM movement in my community amidst current continued police brutality, I saw a new approach: an emphasis on education and

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promoting conversations surrounding topics such as privilege and local racial history.

A NEW APPROACH Rather than a local chapter of Black Lives Matter leading the movement, a new organization has formed with adapted goals based on the makeup and population size of our rural community. This organization, Right and Wrong, has been formed to fill a gap of community voices regarding racial equality within Grand Junction. Prior to the formation of RAW in June 2020, my community did not have a leading group of people of color to advocate for the systemic changes they believe need to be addressed. Our local chapter of Black Lives Matter quickly lost steam and community support, and now only functions as a platform to share information on local events.

As a majority White town, few community members understood what specific changes should be advocated for. Without the firsthand experience of oppression or a clear message coming from those who are, it’s difficult to support change. The formation of RAW has helped community members like myself understand what systems need to be targeted and how we can work to support and advocate for change on the local level.

RAW’s work began with a classic form of protest and a list of demands for change within our community. Soon, a representative task force was working with city officials, community members, and the police department to work towards much needed changes in line with RAW’s demands. The organizers of RAW have also dubbed themselves as part of the “right and wrong movement,” working to ensure fundamental rights and wrongs are addressed.

Since then, organizers of RAW have been working with the GJPD, Grand Junction City Council, Mesa County Valley School District, and representatives from Colorado Mesa University.

Founder Antonio Clark stated in an interview with the HPR that they hope to work beyond racial equality as well, “Black lives is what we’ve been focused on at the moment, but that definitely doesn’t stop there. We’re looking to help any segment of the community that feels disenfranchised or feel like they deal with oppression or injustice, we’re committed to fighting for change.”

RAW chose to expand their mission in an effort to ensure a safe and equitable community for all.

AN UNLIKELY ALLIANCE In many communities police departments have worked to support and enforce oppressive systems against people of color.

In Grand Junction, local organizers have begun building a relationship with the Grand Junction Police Department in order to change that.

The organizers of Right and Wrong have had multiple meetings with Chief Shoemaker and others of the Grand Junction Police Department with one of their current goals being to “rework” their implicit bias training system. In the state of Colorado, the required implicit bias training that officers take part in is a completely online course. Implicit bias training is a fundamental component in teaching individuals to keep their biases in check, but to be reduced to an online course that can easily be skimmed or forgotten is detrimental to the effectiveness of police. If executed properly, implicit bias training could

be a key component in reforming not only police departments but societal behavior as we know it.

When asked about implicit bias training Chief Shoemaker stated in an interview with the HPR, “I find locally that maybe our training isn’t as effective as it could be. So, what I’d like to do is maybe have some training that’s perhaps a little bit more experiential.” Chief Shoemaker and RAW are currently working together to find ways to rework and expand this training to tie in and discuss issues more relevant to our specific community.

EDUCATING THE NEXT GENERATION Organizers in Grand Junction have begun to adapt rallies and protests into recurring teach-ins working to educate the community on local history, knowing your rights, and the importance of voting. Prior to witnessing these events in my community, I had not seen any other communities implementing events like this. One of RAW’s priorities is implementing Black history in schools and offering opportunities for community members to learn about allyship, privilege, and the parts of America’s racist history omitted in school. Although inclusive education has been an attempt in a multitude of locations throughout the U.S., this is the first attempt within my community.

These teach-ins have symbolized a turning point within Grand Junction, showing that there are people who are dedicated to learning and growing and willing to show up for the cause, which has renewed a new sense of hope. Multiple different social justice movements have attempted to make change in our community, but they never seem to move beyond one or two protests. RAW is creating a different type of local movement, one in which they continue to develop new ideas that can be improved upon and implemented for years to come, such as their current project of putting together a local Black history museum.

The adaptation of rallies to teach-ins have proved the movement’s longevity and showed that community members are willing to learn, which has allowed RAW’s organizers to work towards change in multiple parts of our community including our school district. The goals for Mesa County Valley School District is to implement a student equity council in each school to teach students about equity versus equality and the presence of racial injustice in America, as well as lead conversations regarding equity improvements in school. In an interview with the HPR, Demetrius Davis, a founder of RAW, said “We can show the kids, you know the small marginalized kids in this area that are colored, you know, especially black that they’re being represented, even though they are such a small percentage of our population here in Grand Junction.” With such a small portion of Grand Junction being people of color, it is essential that underrepresented youth are supported and given outlets to have their voices heard. Activation of the voices of the underrepresented is essential in making just and effective changes towards a more inclusive community.

SET IN THEIR WAYS Additionally, the current local movement has been able to gain traction due to the small population size which promotes easier access to community leaders. In smaller rural communities, there is lower demand for conversation with community leaders, so there are often few participants in the public com-

WINTER 2020 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 37

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ment portions of city council meetings, which allows a large amount of speaking time for attendees. However, access does not equal change.

When asked about the access to and receptibility of community leaders, Clark, co-founder of RAW, stated “It’s not hard to get physically in front of them, but actually reaching them and showing them that this is something that needs to be addressed I feel like it’s harder in smaller towns.” This factor of difficulty to get community leaders to truly listen and act can be attributed to the common stereotype that rural communities are stuck in the past. Often proposals for progress and efforts to create a more inclusive environment are turned away due to “traditions.”

The ideology of Grand Junction contributes to the difficulty of enacting change. There is a generational tendency among community members to attend the local college after graduating from high school and remain in the local workforce their whole life. This tendency is not inherently negative, but when a predominantly White community does not seek to see beyond the traditional cycle of function within their community, oppressive and biased systems never change.

Due to these patterns, disruption of the current system functions through not only protest and the voices of community members, but through the election or hiring of new community leaders. The current Grand Junction police chief was sworn in only two years ago, and due to his more progressive views, local organizers have been able to propose changes they see as needed. Additionally, Grand Junction City Councilwoman Anna Stout was elected in 2019, and since then, has continuously served to amplify voices of the community not traditionally heard, including those of the local Black community.

COMBATING INGRAINED PATTERNS Without these transitions of leadership to new individuals from either out of town or younger generations, my community would not be seeing the beginning of widespread changes currently occurring. The disruption I am witnessing in my community goes far beyond protests, as it reaches positions of leadership. We are finally witnessing a period of voluntary progress and change in which leaders are actively working to find ways they can implement much-needed changes into the community.

Despite this hope and apparent turning point, we still face widespread bias and anger over the idea that racism exists and is present in our community. Any local media coverage of protests, teach-ins, or announcements regarding the progress being made is met with immense backlash from within the community as well as Facebook threats aimed towards all organizers involved.

Those who advocate for progress often face harassment on social media, at school, or even in the workplace.

I have always seen my town as a hateful and difficult place to live for anyone who believes in equal rights and human rights. In the workplace, out in the community, and on social media, it is apparent that in our community and many others like it racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and general bias are alive and well. Activists involved with the local organization Right and Wrong, such as Antonio Clark and Demetrius Davis, have brought a new sense of hope that our community can change, that we can begin to address the bias and hatred head-on. Davis summed the goal up well: “It’s about getting people back in touch with humanity.” The hope is that this idea of getting in

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touch with humanity can bring change to not only my community but others struggling in the same way. The fight will be difficult, but my community has proven to have more supporters than anyone could have expected, and we have been blessed with some receptive leaders. Now it is just about ensuring the oppressed and disfranchised members of the community are not avoided and silenced again. 

Tren ds.

..

t’s a h W Hot?

The Fraught Path to Diversity in Fashion Media cont .

Pag e6 WINTER 2020 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 39

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I

remember flipping through the glossy pages of the September “Vogue” issue on a chilly middle school day and feeling like I was glimpsing into another world. The sheer opulence looking up at me from the magazine — all the sophisticated models adorned by beautiful material luxuries — was so foreign to me. Still, all that glamour felt emphatically better than the mundane realities of my life. Sensing my insecurity, the magazine surrounded these fascinating images with simple instructions on how to enter this mesmerizing world. With the right routines and elaborate purchases, I could theoretically buy membership into this stylish, elegant, predominantly white realm, at least until the trends shifted.

The fashion and beauty industries are fundamentally predicated on peddling doses of exclusivity to eager ordinary consumers. Magazine headlines such as “How to Recreate Kendall Jenner’s ‘90s Summer Wardrobe” and “How To Look Like A Beauty Model” entice tepid readers to aspire to buy celebrity.

In a profitable, self-fulfilling cycle, lifestyle magazines create insecurity in consumers by showing them the possibility of glamour and then perpetuating that feeling through sly product placements. In fact, the basic premise of these businesses is that through following a series of prescriptive, purchasable directives laid out by fashion and lifestyle magazines, it’s possible to become one of the “it girls” represented by them. But this hypnotic idea presented to consumers is logically flawed: if anyone can become an elite, then its very definition is compromised.

This contradiction is why the recent rise in inclusive marketing and diversity efforts within lifestyle media companies such as “Vogue” and “Refinery 29” confuse me. With lifestyle and fashion media possessing a continued history of constantly trying to sell an image of exclusivity, how is this compatible with their seemingly intensifying efforts to become more inclusive in their employment and content? Seeing socially conscious, inclusive content right next to blatant advertisements for exclusive products seems contradictory and perhaps distasteful. It seems as if having a certain amount of “woke” content gives these media companies a license to continue their exclusivity.

This contradiction is exemplified by the building controversy around Vogue, which has been blasted for its late and flawed attempts at diversity. A recent article in The New York Times details “Vogue”’s complicated relationship with diversity. As a proudly highbrow magazine in both content and composition, “Vogue” has historically employed only thin, wealthy white women. As such, the lack of diversity in the publication’s creative talent is reflected in many culturally insensitive, disconnected pieces of content.

For example, a March 2017 Japanese-inspired shoot for “Vogue”’s “diversity issue” styled white model Karlie Kloss as a traditional geisha, inserting her into culturally specific settings.

It’s jarring that “Vogue” chose to “Asianize” a white model instead of giving space for actual Japanese models in the shoot.

Although Kloss and the magazine apologized after the shoot was denounced as a glaring example of cultural appropriation, similar incidents have continued to accrue. Most notably, Kendall Jenner was praised by the style section of “Vogue” for sporting fake gold teeth, a move many again saw as clear cultural appropriation.

In response to this growing criticism, “Vogue” has publicly committed to increasing internal diversity, with American “Vogue” editor in chief Anna Wintour stating in June 2020, “I

40 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW WINTER 2020

know “Vogue” has not found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers, and other creators … I take full responsibility for those mistakes.”

Still, relevant action steps have yet to be announced.

The acknowledgment alone may seem like an important first step, but it’s hard to determine how sincere it really is. There have continued to be reported attempts at cultural “fronting” within “Vogue,” with BIPOC junior employees often being called into meetings solely to approve culturally adjacent projects.

For instance, a Black junior employee was called to a highlevel meeting with actress and October 2016 cover star Lupita Nyong’o to voice her thoughts on an Afrocentric shoot but was never approached for such a meeting again. As this responsibility is not typically part of the junior employee role at “Vogue,” this practice is deeply insincere.

“Vogue”’s public promises to make amends seem to only manifest in superficially shuffling BIPOC employees around to cover their bases in terms of cultural credibility. Instead, “Vogue” could avoid these situations by actually hiring or promoting senior BIPOC editors, meaningfully increasing the diversity within their ranks. However, there still have not been any apparent changes in the publication’s upper leadership in response to such criticism, although many Black employees have called for the removal of Wintour herself to make room for more diverse leadership. In response, Condé Nast only reaffirmed Wintour’s position at “Vogue.” Moreover, she continues to lead its Diversity and Inclusion Council, ironically occupying a seat that should represent the council’s commitment to diversity.

Accordingly, I wonder whether similar broad moral commitments to diversity by magazines such as “Vogue” are just a way to insulate their existing power structures from criticism.

Fashion has long profited off of the “othering” of marginalized groups. By prioritizing an exclusive ideal of beauty — generally white, slim, and wealthy — magazines such as “Vogue” socialized BIPOC individuals into aspiring to an ideal that could purportedly be achieved through certain products. This is apparent in early advertising of beauty products associated with fair, Eurocentric facial features and bodies, which often pushed BIPOC individuals into chasing an unattainable image of beauty.

As it has been historically more profitable for fashion and beauty to center around an elite, exclusive narrative, it’s hard to see how diversity meaningfully fits into the current fashion system. Certainly, independent art, which can include fashion pieces, should not face any obstacles in truly embracing and celebrating cultural diversity. However, when this art is inherently tied to profit-making through the fashion industry, I wonder how a true diversity reckoning will occur. Does diversity need to be profitable for it to be truly instituted?

Beyond just “Vogue,” other magazines have also undergone similar diversity-related scandals, which have prompted public ethical commitments to inclusion. Both “Bon Appétit” and “Refinery 29” saw significant changes in upper leadership due to allegations of toxic workplaces riddled with racial discrimination.

Compared to the “Vogue” situation, are these changes sufficient?

I’m not sure. They seem like a logical response to the criticism, and I don’t know what alternative immediate measure would have been more effective. I’m simply wary of any moral proclamation by corporations because it’s hard to know what ulterior, profitable motive lurks.

As fashion and lifestyle magazines continue to grapple with

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implementing diversity policies, it’s crucial to continuously question their mechanics. All too often, lofty moral aspirations are accepted as appeasement without a rigorous critique of their literal implications. Corporate leadership has a natural desire to retain their power even when they are part of the problem which needs to be addressed. I don’t know if there exists a golden path to true diversity in these industries; I suspect it is much more complicated than changing the publications’ content itself.

But as long as we continue to stay engaged with these questions, I think we can find progress. have continued to be reported attempts at cultural “fronting” within “Vogue,” with BIPOC junior employees often being called into meetings solely to approve culturally adjacent projects. For instance, a Black junior employee was called to a high-level meeting with actress and October 2016 cover star Lupita Nyong’o to voice her thoughts on an Afrocentric shoot but was never approached for such a meeting again. As this responsibility is not typically part of the junior employee role at “Vogue,” this practice is deeply insincere.

“Vogue”’s public promises to make amends seem to only manifest in superficially shuffling BIPOC employees around to cover their bases in terms of cultural credibility. Instead, “Vogue” could avoid these situations by actually hiring or promoting senior BIPOC editors, meaningfully increasing the diversity within their ranks. However, there still have not been any apparent changes in the publication’s upper leadership in response to such criticism, although many Black employees have called for the removal of Wintour herself to make room for more diverse leadership. In response, Condé Nast only reaffirmed Wintour’s position at “Vogue.” Moreover, she continues to lead its Diversity and Inclusion Council, ironically occupying a seat that should represent the council’s commitment to diversity.

Accordingly, I wonder whether similar broad moral commitments to diversity by magazines such as “Vogue” are just a way to insulate their existing power structures from criticism.

Fashion has long profited off of the “othering” of marginalized groups. By prioritizing an exclusive ideal of beauty — generally white, slim, and wealthy — magazines such as “Vogue” socialized BIPOC individuals into aspiring to an ideal that could purportedly be achieved through certain products. This is apparent in early advertising of beauty products associated with fair, Eurocentric facial features and bodies, which often pushed BIPOC individuals into chasing an unattainable image of beauty.

As it has been historically more profitable for fashion and beauty to center around an elite, exclusive narrative, it’s hard to see how diversity meaningfully fits into the current fashion system. Certainly, independent art, which can include fashion pieces, should not face any obstacles in truly embracing and celebrating cultural diversity. However, when this art is inherently tied to profit-making through the fashion industry, I wonder how a true diversity reckoning will occur. Does diversity need to be profitable for it to be truly instituted?

Beyond just “Vogue,” other magazines have also undergone similar diversity-related scandals, which have prompted public ethical commitments to inclusion. Both “Bon Appétit” and “Refinery 29” saw significant changes in upper leadership due to allegations of toxic workplaces riddled with racial discrimination.

Compared to the “Vogue” situation, are these changes sufficient?

I’m not sure. They seem like a logical response to the criticism, and I don’t know what alternative immediate measure would have been more effective. I’m simply wary of any moral procla-

mation by corporations because it’s hard to know what ulterior, profitable motive lurks.

As fashion and lifestyle magazines continue to grapple with implementing diversity policies, it’s crucial to continuously question their mechanics. All too often, lofty moral aspirations are accepted as appeasement without a rigorous critique of their literal implications. Corporate leadership has a natural desire to retain their power even when they are part of the problem which needs to be addressed. I don’t know if there exists a golden path to true diversity in these industries; I suspect it is much more complicated than changing the publications’ content itself. But as long as we continue to stay engaged with these questions, I think we can find progress. 

cont .

Pag e6

Rep res

enta tion & Eq uity

...

icon Style

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Water is China’s Greatest Weapon and its Achilles Heel

by Sophia Weng

T

he live-action “Mulan” movie is no stranger to criticism. #BoycottMulan began trending in August 2019, more than a year before the live-action “Mulan” release. Protestors lobbied against the movie because Chinese star Liu Yifei, the actress who played Mulan, reposted a pro-Hong Kong police comment during the democracy demonstrations last year. This year, much of the controversy surrounding the live-action “Mulan” centers around how Disney filmed parts of the live-action “Mulan” in collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party of Xinjiang that is directly responsible for committing cultural genocide against Uighur Muslims.

In light of these issues, the cultural and patriarchal missteps of the movie’s plot may seem secondary. However, even if Disney had filmed the movie without affirming cultural genocide, the live-action “Mulan” would still be incredibly problematic for women and Chinese culture.

Aesthetically, the live-action “Mulan” resembles a Wuxia story, a Chinese martial arts heroes movie, and it more closely adheres to that archetype of film than the standard “Disney

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Brand.” At face value, it appears as if the live-action “Mulan” is trying to be more authentically Chinese, using an Asian art form.

However, looking closer, the live-action “Mulan” exposes itself as an over-orientalized Western perspective on Chinese culture, not a genuinely Chinese story.

The live-action “Mulan” is so devoted to filial piety and Mulan learning her place in society that the movie misses the core of Chinese stories, including the Wuxia movies it aesthetically resembles: hard work. In contrast, although Disney’s animated “Mulan” was also quite a Western story, it manages to capture the essence of the original “Ballad of Mulan” by centering Mulan’s character around the core Chinese values of effort and perseverance.

Disney may have made the changes from the animated to the live-action movie to more closely adhere to the original Chinese poem, but a cursory look at the new adaptation shows this cannot be the case. In the “Ballad of Mulan,” Mulan begins at a loom as a typical woman of her time, unlike the live-action prodigy Mulan. The poem’s Mulan works hard to fight alongside her

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male counterparts and wins accolades and promotions through her efforts, like in the animated “Mulan.”

The animated Mulan’s greatest strength is that she solves her problems, even overcoming the men in her story, through her intelligence and work ethic. Everyone remembers the scene where Mulan becomes the first person among her training group of men to successfully climb to the top of the pole using the weights instead of being dragged down by them. This character development builds to her defeat of the main villain of the movie, Shan Yu. Mulan applies her cultivated skills and intelligence to take control of Shan Yu’s sword using her fan, pin him in place, and knock him off a roof with a firework, saving all of China.

The animated Mulan’s story is fundamentally about gender roles as well. Mulan struggles to see herself as a potential bride at the beginning of the movie during the song “Honor to Us All.” Mulan also misunderstands how to present masculinity when she first walks into camp, staggering around and hitting men to greet them.

Still, by the end of the movie, Mulan and her fellow soldiers learn to embrace femininity as a weapon, infiltrating the palace by dressing as women instead of ramming their way through the main door. Mulan can fight as well as a man, and she does, but she ultimately defeats Shan Yu by using her fan and her intelligence, not her masculine strengths. The resolution of her story is so compelling because it resonates with everyone who has struggled to fit into their own cultural conventions. In contrast, the live-action Mulan never challenges the status quo or reevaluates how she lives her life.

Instead, the live-action Mulan is a prodigy, gifted with superhuman abilities because she has “strong chi.” Chi is a traditional Chinese concept, the life energy that “fuels” all beings, like breath or blood. Chinese acupuncture is based on the flow of chi, and chi often appears in Chinese stories as a major element.

However, the new Mulan fundamentally mischaracterizes chi to the point where most Chinese people are simply confused by this “cultural” reference. Chi is not selective like the force from Star Wars; everyone has chi. In other Wuxia movies, characters can cultivate chi through hard work, and it would have been so easy for the filmmakers to focus on this version of chi, to value hard work over natural ability. But instead, because of her superpowers, the live-action Mulan can just kick aside her problems with her superhuman strength.

Additionally, the live-action Mulan does not come in conflict with her society’s gender roles; her actions are dictated by “knowing her place.” She never faces any backlash for revealing herself as a woman either, because she has these superhuman abilities. The men in her story accept her because she is strong in a masculine way, yet she still subscribes to her societally determined role. She chooses to fight as a woman because she never has to struggle against the constraints of her gender, and she never needs to use her resourcefulness to overcome challenges in her story.

There are two other new characters in the story whose arcs reinforce the patriarchy within the live-action movie: Mulan’s sister and the Witch. Mulan’s sister is an ordinary girl for her time, not gifted with superpowers like her sister. In a version of the movie actually focused on empowering women, Mulan’s sister might have been inspired by Mulan to dictate her own life choices. However, when Mulan returns home, her sister runs up

to her, excitedly proclaiming that she “is matched” for marriage.

Mulan’s sister is not special, and this subplot, which is unrelated to the main story, just serves to illustrate that normal women, unlike prodigy Mulan, must stay confined to their prescribed societal roles.

The other character that reinforces the patriarchy does so in the opposite way, demonstrating how a woman overstepping “her place” must be punished. The Witch is meant to be a dramatic foil to Mulan, another woman gifted with supernatural abilities who dares to present herself as a warrior. The character of the Witch has more power than any other character in the movie, single-handedly taking down fortifications and infiltrating the imperial palace. However, she works with autonomy and is only barely willing to stay subservient to the Rouran warlords she works with. Under this movie’s premise, the Witch has to face retribution by dying for using her abilities outside of the status quo. It is difficult to imagine a reason for either of these subplots beyond enforcing a hyper-orientalist perception of Chinese attitudes towards society and gender roles.

Chinese people often are portrayed in Western media as confined by the status quo, subscribing to “Confucian values” and patriarchal structures. Chinese women especially are shown as subservient and unwilling to challenge their stations. The liveaction Mulan is given a place in society, a place that she never needs to challenge, unlike the other Mulans before her. She and the women around her either fall directly into this Chinese stereotype or are punished by the movie for deviating from it.

Chinese people have nuance, as all people do, and it is painfully evident that there were no Chinese writers behind the scenes because the live-action movie lacks this nuance in its portrayal of gender roles and Chinese society.

The animated Mulan is a feminist hero because she carves out her place, negotiating her gender on her own terms. Disney’s live-action “Mulan” could have been an amazing opportunity to bring Mulan’s story of empowerment to a new generation of young women and represent genuine Chinese culture, but instead, we got this movie. 

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INTERVIEWS

‘The Racial Contract’:

CHARLES W. MILLS withWoojin Lim

C

harles W. Mills is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Born in the U.K. and raised in Jamaica, he is a leading thinker in social and political philosophy as it centers on class, gender, and race. His first book, “The Racial Contract,” introduces the titular concept: a “contract” that permits white people to violate their own moral principles in dealing with non-white individuals. In his latest book, “Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism,” he argues that the history of denying equal rights to Black people and other people of color racializes liberalism in fundamental ways and that we are still living with this legacy today.

Harvard Political Review: Some claim that one’s academic work should be a reflection of one’s identity. How has your identity and background shaped your scholarship?

Charles W. Mills: I would say that they have had a major effect, one that I’ve actually written about in autobiographical essays, for example, in my 2016 APA Central Division Dewey Lecture, “The Red and the Black.” Jamaica is a small country of less than 3 million people that has been fundamentally shaped by European imperialism. I’m from a Black-majority society, though as with many other Caribbean and Latin countries, the racial/color conventions are different from the United States. The “one-drop rule” doesn’t hold, and “browns” were originally clearly demarcated from “Blacks” in a three-tiered white/Brown/Black social pyramid. As a “brown” Jamaican, I was — and to a certain extent still am — relatively privileged vis-à-vis the Black majority. So in a sense, in coming to the U.S. to work after I got my PhD in Canada, I was changing race, becoming part of an unambiguously subordinated “Black” American racial group, while equipped with the inherited cultural capital and privilege of my “brown”

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Jamaican middle-class origins and education.

You’ll appreciate, then, the complexities of this evolving hybrid combination of privilege and disadvantage, insider and outsider status, and its resulting weird epistemic amalgam of insight and obtuseness. I’m not Black American in the sense of having U.S. family origins that go back to slavery. But I’m Black and an American citizen, and I certainly identify with and have tried to support in my work, the long Black American struggle for racial equality and justice.

The U.S. and Jamaica are vastly different in innumerable ways.

But what they have in common is that they’re both former slave societies, built on the racial exploitation of African persons. Yet whereas this historical reality is very much part of everyday consciousness in Black-majority Jamaica, it has been suppressed in white-majority America. Hence the hostility to the “1619 Project” and the truths it’s telling, truths that many white Americans still refuse to hear.

In political philosophy specifically, my main research area, it has produced such absurdities as John Rawls’s recommendation in the opening pages of “A Theory of Justice” that we should think of society as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage” whose rules are “designed to advance the good of those taking part in it.” You can imagine my astonishment when I originally encountered this bizarre stipulation in my very first graduate course in political philosophy at the University of Toronto, especially since Jamaica at that time was fiercely caught up in a national debate about the colonial past and its legacy. Slavery?

Colonialism? Racism? Indigenous genocide? A tad socially coercive, perhaps? How could these possibly be reconciled with such

INTERVIEWS

a theoretical prescription?

I’m still trying, all these years later to understand the mindset that has made such astonishing evasions cognitively possible. By contrast, from the time I started working systematically on race a quarter-century ago, I have argued that we should locate these issues of social justice within the framework of “white supremacy.” One positive epistemic aspect of Donald Trump’s election generally, and this summer’s George Floyd demonstrations specifically, is that such a framework no longer seems as radical as it once would have to mainstream types. Far more Americans of all races, including white Americans, now recognize the centrality of institutionalized racial domination to the country’s formation and development. We just need political philosophy to catch up.

HPR: What current projects are you working on?

CM: My publisher for “The Racial Contract,” Cornell University Press, will be bringing out a new 25th-anniversary edition of the book in 2022 that will also celebrate its attaining the landmark of 50,000 copies sold. I’m also writing up my February 2020 Tanner Lecture, “Theorizing Racial Justice,” that I gave at the University of Michigan for publication in the Tanner Lecture Series. However, my main project will be completing a longdelayed book manuscript, “The White Leviathan: Nonwhite Bodies in the White Body Politic,” for Oxford UP’s new “Critical Philosophy of Race” book series. It will be looking at the racialization of the body politic and the corresponding need for corrective racial justice.

So, given the present heightened national and global consciousness about race and racism in the aftermath of Floyd’s killing, the timing is obviously good for all these projected works, and I hope they will make a useful contribution to the debate. It’s a very exciting time for me professionally, though correspondingly a very busy one.

HPR: Could you lay out your understanding of the “racial contract,” its relation to the “social contract,” and its moral, political, and epistemic dimensions?

CM: The social contract is a crucial concept in modern Western political theory that’s trying to answer two main questions, one descriptive/political and one normative/moral. We imagine ourselves as free and equal persons in a pre-social, pre-political situation and then reflect on what kind of social institutions and governmental bodies we would “contractually” choose to bring into existence so as to safeguard those freedoms and that equality. The state is then legitimate because it is fulfilling this safeguarding role. So, the “contract” is really a metaphor for the human creation of the socio-political world and how that world should be structured. It’s not literal but a “story” or a “thoughtexperiment” or, in the words of John Rawls, a “device of representation,” and one that makes consent and equal inclusion foundational. Call it the consensual egalitarian contract. Morally equal human beings looking at the world objectively create polities that represent their interests equally. In principle, it’s a contract we should all be able to endorse.

The “golden age” of social contract theory was 1650 to 1800, which covers the “big four” contract theorists: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. After that, it suffers a historic decline. But it is then spectacularly revived by Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice” and has been thriving ever since. In Rawls’ work, and in the critical literature stimulated by it, the normative question then becomes: What would a society with a perfectly just “basic structure” look like?

HPR: So why then do we need the additional concept of a “racial” contract, and what’s problematic about the Rawlsian project?

CM: The problem is that there’s always been an ambiguity in the contract literature as to whether as a “story” or “metaphor” it’s only projecting an attractive ideal or is also supposed to be representing, albeit in a very abstract way, the historical actuality. We can all agree that society and the polity should have been constructed consensually and inclusively. But since we all know they weren’t, don’t we need a complementary metaphor to capture the real-world side of things?

After all, even in “modern” Western liberal societies, white women continue to be subordinated, while “non-whites” now emerge as a new category of “inferior” humans whose conquest and colonization by the West is regarded as legitimate. Even the white male working class does not get the franchise for hundreds of years.

Clearly, then, the metaphor appropriate for the descriptive realm has to be radically different from that appropriate for the ideal normative realm. It has to highlight domination rather than inclusion. And since in these systems, class and gender domination are rationalized as justifiable, an “epistemology of ignorance” will be a functional part of it, that in crucial respects systematically betrays ideal Enlightenment norms and correspondingly distorts reality. Call it the non-consensual and non-egalitarian domination contract.

So the “racial contract” — like Rousseau’s “class contract” and Pateman’s “sexual contract” — can be thought of as an in-group agreement among the privileged to restrict moral and political equality to themselves, and maintain the subordination as unequals of the out-group (here, people of color). The fact that the Black Lives Matter movement has had such resonance around the globe demonstrates the extent to which our nominally postcolonial world today is still highly continuous with that one.

What’s problematic about the Rawlsian project, therefore, is that rather than recognizing this central fact about the Western-created world, he assumes consensuality in both the descriptive and normative realms. This Rawlsian evasion is the updated form of the “epistemology of ignorance,” a white ignorance that no longer justifies racial subordination as in the colonial and overtly white supremacist epoch, but erases it. Hence the ludicrous characterization of Western society as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.” There is no theorization in his work, indeed there is barely even an acknowledgment, of the reality of racial oppression in Western societies. And this refusal to face reality then undermines his normative project, in the form of the struc-

WINTER 2020 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 45

INTERVIEWS

tural exclusion of corrective racial justice.

HPR: Rawls appears to differentiate “ideal theory” (principles of justice for a perfectly just society) from “non-ideal theory.” Wouldn’t principles of corrective racial justice fall under the latter? So couldn’t Rawls just reply that he’s chosen to focus on ideal theory, but that other people can work on extrapolating his principles to cover racial justice, as a matter of non-ideal theory?

CM: That was my original assumption, and my corresponding criticism was to ask why, since Rawls himself emphasized that issues of non-ideal theory were the “pressing and urgent” ones, this challenge had not been taken up by Rawlsians in all the decades since his book first appeared. After all, isn’t racial injustice in the U.S. particularly “pressing and urgent”?

But a year or two ago I had an epiphany that made me rethink my position. I have now concluded that we have been misinterpreting Rawls all along, though the textual evidence has been there from the start. His “cooperative venture for mutual advantage” characterization is really meant not as a definition of society but as a restriction of the kinds of societies to which his principles apply. And these turn out to be, as made explicit in his later work, modern Western liberal societies. So it’s still an absurd depiction, but the precise nature of the absurdity is somewhat different than I had originally assumed. He thought such societies were close enough to being fully just that they fitted the cooperative venture characterization.

So if — as the events of the last few months might just possibly have led you to suspect — the U.S. is indeed a racist society, then the startling implication is that Rawls’s principles, ideal or extrapolated non-ideal, do not apply to the U.S. Rawls was so deeply in the grip of white ignorance about the centrality of racism and white supremacy to the creation of the modern Western world, including the United States, that he excluded racist societies from the ambit of his theory, thereby constructing a theory of social justice inapplicable to his own country! Millions of idealistic, young Americans have started university this fall, and I’m sure that many of them were deeply shocked by Floyd’s killing and the pervasive racial inequities it has revealed in our society. But if they hope to receive guidance from philosophy social justice courses on how to create a more racially just United States, they will get no help from white Rawlsianism. The past half-century has shown that white Rawlsians have had almost no interest in such a project in the first place, and it now turns out, if I’m right, that the apparatus is structurally recalcitrant to such an attempted appropriation anyway.

HPR: In what ways would you view your academic scholarship as a form of activism? What can the Black Lives Matter movement take away from your work? What should be the role of philosophers at this critical juncture in time?

CM: The real credit for the current heightened awareness of racial injustice obviously has to go to the people who have been or-

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ganizing out in the real, non-academic world for years. They’re the true heroes of this moment. But if you think of the anti-racist struggle as being waged on multiple fronts and in multiple arenas, given the deep entrenchment of white racial domination across the society at large, then professors do have a role to play.

I would certainly hope that my academic scholarship over the years has had some effect, even if a very small one, in helping to raise people’s consciousness about issues of race and racial injustice. But let’s face it, this would be a very comfortable kind of “activism,” if it even deserves the name!

So-called “public” philosophy, taking a stand on and offering philosophical insight into current issues, is increasingly respectable, so that’s one obvious option. Cornel West has been doing this for the four decades of his career, in keeping with the Deweyan conception of the discipline. But it’s noteworthy that never in those forty years has he worked in a philosophy department, precisely because he did not see it as providing room for such an engagement. Thankfully, I believe things are now beginning to change somewhat, in significant measure because of pressure from the groups historically marginalized in the profession.

But white women have made far greater progress than people of color in the struggle for diversification. Blacks, for example, make up only one percent of the profession.

What can philosophers do with respect to race specifically?

Well, there is now far more work in critical philosophy of race than when I graduated decades ago — the term didn’t even exist then — so the overwhelmingly white-majority professoriate should be trying to incorporate such material into their courses.

The horizon-expanding question to ask yourself is: how could race be brought into courses on ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, social epistemology, philosophy of language, political philosophy, phenomenology and existentialism, the history of philosophy, and so forth?

Consider again my own area of specialization, political philosophy. The standard narrative in the field is that the dominant Anglo-American tradition was moribund by the 1950s, and was only revived by the 1971 publication of Rawls’s “A Theory of Justice.” Rawls is given the credit both for resurrecting AngloAmerican political philosophy and reorienting its normative focus from the issue of our political obligation to the state to the issue of the justice of society’s basic structure. But this story is completely false, and is a wonderful example of what I suggested above is the “conceptual” whiteness of philosophy.

Well over a century before Rawls, African American political theorists had initiated a tradition founded on the condemnation of the racial injustice of the United States: David Walker, Maria Stewart, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and many others. These folks were English-speaking and citizens of the United States.

So here’s the question: why are they completely excluded from the official “Anglo-American” origins story? And the unavoidable answer is that the tradition is tacitly being defined as white: “Anglo-American” really means “white people!”

So we need a reconceptualization of the field that would take seriously the decades of decolonial and anti-Eurocentric critique.

INTERVIEWS

And in that way, we could reshape the discipline to be more reflective of the demography and the concerns of the multiracial and multicultural nation as a whole. Surely the Republican Party should not be the model for philosophy?

HPR: Finally, is today a turning point for American democracy, or is history repeating itself? How do you see the Racial Contract now, in the light of this summer’s massive protests? And as a Jamaican American, what do you think of the choice of Kamala Harris as the Democratic vicepresidential nominee?

that does not mean I am not sensitive to the many other axes of social injustice. In other words, to gain white support, racial justice will need to be embedded in a larger project of class and gender justice, bringing together moral imperatives and group interests, so as to get rid of the combined “domination contract.”

Whether such a radical political vision can be articulated so as to be attractive to the white majority, and whether it can be achieved, remains to be seen. 

CM: On straight nationalist grounds, I’m naturally delighted and happy also that a woman of color has attained such a position, given the long history of exclusion of those so doubly subordinated. It’s great that she is being claimed both by the Black and the Indian communities.

The demonstrations over unjustified police killings and structural racism more broadly have been unprecedented in size, duration, national scope, and their high degree of white participation.

That has indeed been inspirational. But in trying to understand race in the U.S., it’s really important not to get caught up in the moment, and to maintain a historical perspective on the racial longue durée. After all, there have been many such moments before: the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War Amendments, the Brown Supreme Court decision, the “Second Reconstruction” of the 1960s, and, most recently of course, Barack Obama’s 2008 election.

While the symbolic significance of a female Black/Asian vice president will be huge, we must of course recall that we did recently have two terms of a Black president. And it’s not the case that in those eight years the wealth gap was closed, residential and educational segregation ended, disproportionate police killings of Black and Brown Americans stopped, or anything like that. That’s precisely what people are still protesting! The symbolic is important, and I’m all for the removal of Confederate flags and monuments, the renaming of institutions, the abolition of mock-Native American team names, and so forth. But that’s the easy part. There’s also, and more importantly, the substantive.

Whatever my criticisms of Rawls, his concept of the basic structure is a very valuable contribution to political philosophy, even if its potential is unrealized in his hands and those of his disciples. The real question for us should be, as I suggested above: How do we dismantle a racialized basic structure? This will require much more of white Americans than going to the Floyd demonstrations, buying a “Black Lives Matter” T-shirt, and conscientiously reading some of the numerous books on race and racism that have zoomed on to The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. The pandemic is still with us, and its full disastrous economic impact has yet to fully manifest itself.

Tearing up the racial contract will demand a project of national reconstruction, the allocation of whose burdens will need to recognize the problems tens of millions of poor, working-class, and unemployed white Americans are facing also. My own research focus over most of my career has been on race, as indicated, but

WINTER 2020 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 47

ENDPAPER

Productivity in a Post-2020 World

E

ach year, as he addresses the new class of Harvard College first-years at their Convocation, Dean Rakesh Khurana encourages students to pursue a “transformational” rather than “transactional” education. Indeed, in his first major speech as Dean of Harvard College, Khurana outlined his vision of a transformational education, which is rooted not in material goals but in “the ideal of intellectual exploration, in the pursuit of connecting with people who are different from you and learning from them, and in the process of reflecting on what you’ve learned and deciding what kind of person you want to be.”

As a first-year student, overwhelmed by Harvard’s magnificence after growing up in rural Colorado, I wholeheartedly bought into Khurana’s vision of transformative education. Like most of my classmates, I resolved to make the most of my time at Harvard by embracing so-called “productivity culture” I filled every possible block of my Google Calendar with classes, study groups, student organization activities, office hours, and social events. I was not alone — it is striking how often friends have shown off their bursting calendars to me, bragging about how little sleep they planned to get in the week ahead.

Of course, an obsession with productivity is not unique to Harvard. Researchers have found that the majority of Americans consider being busy a status symbol. When research participants were asked to review social media profiles, they “consistently associated indications of busyness with being more competent and ambitious, more sought-after in the job market, and having greater wealth and social status.” America’s obsession with productivity dates back to its founding. Still, even Benjamin Franklin — who invented the day planner — would be deemed lazy by today’s standards given his two-hour midday break.

Despite its entrenchment in American society, even productivity culture has not been immune to the effects of COVID-19.

Millions of people have lost their jobs, and many lucky enough to remain employed are working from home. Universities have closed their campuses, spreading their students around the world. Families and friends are grieving for loved ones lost to the pandemic, and a mental health crisis is spiraling out of control.

Research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the proportion of U.S. adults with symptoms of anxiety disorder and/or depressive disorder have quadrupled since before the pandemic, with the burden disproportionately borne by women and people of color. Amid such chaos, maintaining a schedule of any form, much less a “productive” schedule, is often impossible.

After Harvard closed its campus in March 2020, spreading its students around the world, I returned to the same bedroom

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Wyatt Hurt

in my grandma’s house where I had once done my high school homework. My previously-bustling schedule had been reduced to two-dimensions; my professors, friends, and much of my family now existed as flat tiles in Zoom windows. I often felt numb, shocked by the rising death toll as it ticked ever higher. Feeling helpless, I watched as the most basic public health measures became politicized, as the government wielded violence against protestors asserting that Black Lives Matter, and as Donald Trump and much of the Republican Party cast doubt on our democratic process in the wake of Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

There is an old adage that “when everything is uncertain, everything that is important becomes clear.” For the first time since my Convocation three years prior, I found myself reflecting on Khurana’s call for a “transformational education.” What is the purpose of my time at Harvard? What is the purpose of my work in life more broadly? My friends, family, and even professors —w ho had once seemed so sure of themselves — were asking similar questions. After all, there was no longer a “playbook” to follow, a pre-ordained checklist of things to do to earn a spot with a prestigious campus organization, win a fellowship, or secure a lucrative post-graduation job.

As 2020 wore on, I found myself savoring the greater free time in my life, which allowed me to reflect on these questions.

I deepened my bond with my grandma as we cooked together while she shared stories from her life. With our calendars freer than ever, my friends and I were able to connect via Zoom calls that lasted far longer than any in-person interaction could when productivity culture was in full swing. After the Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced mandatory Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory grades in the spring, I was able to enjoy learning without the threat of grades hanging over my head. Even amid the many traumas brought by 2020, these practices helped me develop a sense of mental clarity and purpose that productivity culture had long ago sapped from me.

In a post-pandemic world, the busyness that constitutes our lives will surely return. But as our calendars fill again in 2021, I resolve to leave free time to pause and reflect more often. I resolve to more genuinely connect with those around me, making the time to deepen my relationship with others. Most importantly, I will measure the quality of my life not by how busy I am but by whether I am helping bring about positive change on issues that truly matter. In short, I will be more deliberate about answering the question posed by Henry David Thoreau in 1857: “It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. The question is, what are you industrious about?”

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